Tandem Scooter - Making it Electric

Hi Everyone;
We’ve had a double scoter for ten years now, it’s a blast to ride. But now we want to do electric.

What the scooter was:

This is mostly plywood, but a sold oak 3/4 stringer is under both trucks. Also a 1.5" plywood strut on each side. The board has cutouts to prevent wheel bite. Wheel are big zig, 77mm if I recall correctly. Trucks are Indy 159mm.

image
This is a cross section, but does no show cutouts.

To electrify…

Two VESC are used as the motors are at each end. Two people on a scooter broke many truck bolts, but never an Indy truck (whew!) Also, the two motors will be facing reverse direction. This allows max reinforcement up to truck to prevent sag.

Wheels are likely going to be 97mm Abec 11 Flywheels (genuine, I’ve had them for years).

image

I plan on hogging the deck to 1/4" (6.3mm) thick at the wheel bite locations.

Your thoughts???

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Please don’t use the flipsky tft. Its impossible to read from. Get a DaveGa.

This is awesome though

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I will use a right and left thumb throttle, right is accelerate, left is regen. The only brakes on original are Flinstonian.

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So the DaveGa is a bit ore, and lacks the ADC, But the throttle can run to the main VESC.

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the flipsky tft is borderline unusable. it’s also massive with a tiny screen. If you can, avoid it. Otherwise I’d say use a smartphone and just connect it to the ESC over BT

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Now I am seeing Arduino stuff for telemetry, that’s in my wheelhouse. Which also allows me to add my own functions.

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Update Block

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I changed to dumb BMS, and a dual VESC plus for power switch. No 12V power supply, as the LED strips want 5V at 2.5A or so. Will need either a 5V IO Arduino, or a shield with a level shifter.

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Using 9" Caliber II Trucks with rake, and the Dickyho mounts need to slide up on the truck to the point where the pivot brace starts to interfere. Rather than grind off the pivot support, I ground out the tombstone adapter to fit the truck. Pictured is 9" Truck, 97mm Flywheels, 15mm belts, and Flipsky 6374 motors.

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Aren’t all Arduinos except the nano 33 and the weird MKR series all 5 natively? Unless you’re talking like ESP32 or Arduino derivatives like that

Btw which flavour of LED are you using? I ran with the SK6812 for a project before over the more standard WS2812 because of the 5V and white channel instead of just RGB, I quite like them

Just got these in

I’m going to get them going on the bench before I install.

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Oh great I must have gotten my model numbers mixed up, I thought the 2812 was 12V but that’s the 2811