The Penetrator | A waterproof Evo for commuting in the UK

[rusins]

Did final preparations this evening before handing the board off. Here you can see the inside layout:

Phase wires do a loop, their bullets are held together with fiberglass tape.
Behind the ESC on the left we have the charge-port fuse holder wrapped in foam for silence, and on the right we have the mini remote receiver.

On the side of the ESC I also have the Robogotchi stuck in place.

All connectors (sensor cables, power button, robogotchi and remote) are secured to the ESC using hot melt glue. I find it to be the best to keep connectors in place, but with the possibility to pick and pry at it to get it off when you need to unplug things eventually.

Here’s a shot of all bolts put in (quite short, only 12mm flat-heads!) and a baggie with some spare bolts (slightly longer, in case the butyl tape adds too much thickness). You can see how wide the enclosure lip is! – I wish Eboosted did that. (But you can also see that the enclosure could have easily been made wider )

Finally, the back truck bolts had come loose, so I added blue threadlocker to all 8 and tightened it well down. Some final glory shots:

Also, because my friend is a cheap-skate, we bought this super flimsy bag from aliexpress meant for xiaomi scooters. Hopefully it’ll survive the airport luggage system

Excuse my messy bedroom workshop

[worldismine772]

great job, lucky friend

[mr.shiteside]

I’m trying to spot the similarities between our janky desk bedroom setups, so far it’s two of the same lamps, matching Allen key set, remarkably similar pile of packing material/shipping boxes, and general disregard for Feng Shui

[EreTroN]

Great build. Those insert threads can really be PITA.

Anyway if you have some other video (preferably 60mins long) that needs editing. I am up for it. Then you can make me 4k build

Great thing of you to make this for him.

[Jaybee86]

I have a 10s4p p42 and I’m super light at 105lbs and I can get 31 miles but if I’m pushing more like 26 so definitely go 12s4-8p.

[rusins]

Going to update this thread with what’s happened with the board and some pictures.

In March Nexusboards finished the battery build, and my friend successfully installed it, using velcro to secure it in place in the enclosure.

One tiny issue was that the ECS wasn’t responding to the Robogotchi or remote signals when turned on. Turns out this was the culprit:

Those are the e-stop pins on the stormcore!

LACROIX Stormcore ESC and iOS app info

I am working with Charles from Lacroix, as well about a maybe similar issue: Right after triggering the e-stop pin on my 100D, the board could not turn off. I don’t even get a flicker of light. The 100D lights stay on (on the board) and the power button turns red and stays that way. Also, the 100D starts heating up significantly next to the power input (where the anti-spark circuit is located). If I unplug and plug the power back in, it is still the same: stays on / red pwr switch / heating…

Luckily thanks the Lee Wright’s stormcore disassembly video I got my friend to open the ESC up and snip those pins off the board. They had likely shorted somehow from the connector getting bent. With the pins snipped the ESC behaved like normal again

Final enclosure layout was such:

We also noticed early signs that the battery build wasn’t up to the quality we had hoped for:

With that wire insulated and more foam added, it was time for the butyl tape to water-seal the board

After the threadlocker cured and the mini remote was recalibrated, my friend could finally enjoy the board he’d been waiting so long for

Enclosure started picking up scratches due to the Brits not having invented curb ramps yet:

[rusins]

The first real issue we had were remote cutouts. This is when my friend, @RDs , and my little brother learned from first-hand experiences that the mini remote just isn’t reliable in today’s noisy RF environment.

Also my friend was really abusing the fact that this board is waterproof, and riding in the rain became a common occurrence

The remote got cleaned and duct-tape added for more weather sealing, but coutouts were still the norm. An upgrade to a puck was inevitable. Luckily Apex stock those, so a batwing puck and receiver arrived shortly.

Also a lot of the bolts were now completely rusty, likely from riding near the beach.

[linsus]

@rusins

riding in the rain became a common occurrence

well yeah… if hes in UK, isnt like one day out of the year not rainy there?

[linsus]

wonder what the insides of those motors look like

[rusins]

The second issue encountered - one of the motors spazzing out

This would happen very randomly, and was nearly impossible to make out looking at logs. We opened up the gear drives, opened up the enclosure to check for unplugged phase wires, no luck. Switching ESC sides always had the issue lead back to the same motor. We had managed to pinpoint that the issue was likely a phase wire short, but the question was - where?

Well, after a few months, we finally found it – I had done a subpar job soldering the MR60 connectors, and over time stress on the wires caused the wires to fray and make small shorts

After consulting with fellow community members, I got instructions on how to solder MR60s with ease and with perfection. It boils down to stripping the 12Awg wire and losing a few strands for an even smaller cross section, tinning the wire to eliminate any stray wires, tinning the cups of the connector itself, and then using a thick soldering iron tip to heat up both so that the wire can be carefully seated in the cup. You also need the male MR30 connected to the female for additional thermal transfer away from the plastic of the connector, to prevent it melting. You also need the stripped section of the wire to be exactly the right length to get a good solder connection, and not have any exposed wires, because there’s no room for heat-shrink with these.

Since the outside wires connected straight to bullets for modularity, I was able to solder up a new set of adapters and mail them off to my friend for replacement. Somehow I can’t find a picture, but they were absolutely perfect

But unfortunately, this was not going to be the last issue.

After replacing the connectors one of the motors would sometimes spin in the wrong direction, or refuse to move at all. I had a pretty good idea that this is due to a sensor issue, and when my friend opened up the board, sure enough, he had put too much pressure on the sensor wires and they had broken off the glued-in JST connectors:

Also we noticed that one of the phase wires internally had almost unplugged. This is crazy, because they connect to epoxied MR60 connectors in the enclosure wall. I guess it goes to show, vibrations will make anything come loose. Use adhesive lined heat-shrink, folks!

[rusins]

After my friend fixed the sensor wires, the motor would still behave weird. Doing motor detection didn’t detect the hall sensors, so most likely the sensors inside the motor had died (despite my conformal coating layer), and now the motor was being run in sensorless mode, which sucks.

I had my friend update to FW6.0, and luckily HFI appears to be a viable solution!

However that’s not the end of our troubles; somehow one of the gear drives has gotten loose:
loose-3ds (1.7 MB)

I have 0 clue how that could happen, since I used Loctite 648 on ALL of the gear drive internal bolts, and let it cure for 72h+ at least. So my friend will have a fun time opening up the gear drive yet again and reapplying threadlocker to those bolts

Amid all this, there was a strange issue that occurred one day – the board would not charge! The smart BMS would report that the board was charging, not charging, charging, not charging, almost as if the BMS was blocking the charge current, even though all the cells were balanced.

Help! Daly Smart BMS refusing to charge

Thanks to some back-and-forth among fellow battery builders, we half-guessed half discovered that a loose charge circuit connection could cause spikes that would trigger the BMS to shut off charging. As you can see in the above thread, the solder job done on the battery connections was awful. Cold joints everywhere, that kept breaking loose as my friend was cutting away the fishpaper to take a closer look. Very disappointing from @Anubis

The black wire had come off already on its own lol.

These are unacceptable solder connections, and no wonder they failed. Get a hotter iron, and use more solder @Anubis !!! This is what good solder connections should look like:

Anyway, after my friend did the best he could to solder the wires back and did a few tug-tests to make sure the connections were good, the board successfully charged again

[rusins]

@linsus

wonder what the insides of those motors look like

Yeah I wonder too, if my friend gets a circlip tool we might find out one day

[rusins]

Current state of the board:

Waiting for tools to fix the gear drive, and a spare innertube to fix a flat that happened while working on the board.

But to end on a happier note, I’d like to share with you a ride that my friend and I went on when I went to visit him in April, because Porter Robinson was touring in Edinburgh

[Brenternet]

Scotland

Have to wear waders to play golf every time I visit.

[Anubis]

Ah yea I remember addressing this before
That being said, the solder joints shown in the below image aren’t really any better than the positive charge was on mine, its the fact the nickel was not scuffed enough that caused issues. Just because the solder is pooled in a ball like that, doesnt mean its actually bonded to the nickel (Something I’ve found out with my own testing/finding issues) (The joints aren’t cold they’re just not bonded to the nickel well enough)

[rusins]

I brought my analog longboard with me, and our goal was to see the famous Forth bridge, since I had never been there, despite studying in Edinburgh for 4 years myself.

7 miles (or 11km) one way, it was a perfect route for the range of this board.

We started off skating by the beach

Since the tide was low, we were able to walk across Cramond Causeway, and visit Cramond island

We then continued along Almond River, sometimes going offroad, until we reached a bridge that would take us outside of the city territory.

The offroad parts were just okay on my longboard. Wish I had dadbod wheels, lol. Anyway, outside the city for the first half of the route there were nice wide pavements and even a separate roadway for cyclists Lots of pretty nature

The sidewalk got narrow and rought, and there was one hill where I had to constantly switch between footbraking to not get wobbles, and keeping my feet on the board to control it because the ground was so bumpy and full of gravel Times like that is when I wish I had an action cam filming me at all times lol. Luckily I didn’t die.

We stopped at a restaurant to charge up the board a little, and have some seafood. Sitting still in the wind was actually really fucking cold, which was crazy since I was sweating my balls off earlier At least the food was good

We then skated to a nearby pier / dock because I have a cool wallpaper of this bridge that I know was shot from there

Perfect tarmac

The waiter at the restaurant told us that there are some really great trails that downhill skateboarders like to visit, son on our way back we took the first left down a private-looking road, and were amazed to find that instead of traveling by the highway we could have been skating through a beautiful park with perfect asphalt and farm animals roaming around free

As I was busy taking photos while casually skating down a hill, I was suddently startled by the sound of motorbikes! A group of sur-ron riders appeared out of nowhere, and I was able to get some sick shots of them doing wheelies

The park goes on for a while.
I highly recommend checking out Dalmery park if you’re ever in Edinburgh!

Bonus pics from the way back home, already back in the city territory:

And here are some random clips I filmed from that day. Skateboarding footage looks slow because I had my 70-300mm lens on, so everything is super zoomed in I’m surprised it’s even somewhat stable hand-held

- YouTube

[rusins]

I’ve found that with good solder (that contains a flux core) I can easily pre-tin the nickel and get a pool of solder on there, and then solder on any wires that I need to. I’ll let others debate whether those joints were cold or not, but IMO if they were hotter then the physical bond between the nickel and solder would have been stronger.

[Pickled_Monkey]

@rusins

The sidewalk

my friend tis a pavement
good thread, the best kind of riding is exploring places

[JesseM]

When i made my jumpers on the Arythmia board, i wanted ot to be waterproof but also not rigid, i used liwuid electrical tape to fill the mt30 so that it was both flexible and waterproof.

Edinburgh is plenty wet at times, love that horizontal rain, a waterproof deck there is a must.

Great build and fine tuning

[rusins]

@JesseM

liquid electrical tape

I really gotta buy some of that finally; just haven’t seen it available anywhere locally.