The Undertow | 10S2P DIY Riptide R1 Throwback

[SeeTheBridges]

Long time no see everyone! My ADHD ass has once again deemed esk8 to be my entire personality for the summer. In honor of that, I’ve pulled an old project out of the garage. 4 years ago, I started working on this guy: a VESC based board using the Riptide R1 desk as my base. I loved shorter boards at the time for suburban riding, but a lots changed in 4 years. A little backstory that the curious can peep here:

Part 1:

Prepping to build a custom esk8 - DIY Riptide R1

Part 2:

Who knew building a DIY esk8 was so hard? (Custom mounts, new motors) - DIY Riptide R1 Build Log Pt2

TLDW: I bought a lot of parts for this board. OG Riptide R1 Deck/trucks/motors, Flipsky motors to avoid eRPM issues, custom CNC mounts to adapt to Flipsky’s weird mounting pattern, several VESCs to choose from, and lots of wheels and pulleys.

Some issues I ran into:

• the original motors risk overloading my VESC4’s eRPM limits
• Nobody makes 50mm motor mounts anymore
• My motor trucks actually arrived with a bent axle I never noticed originally.
• My original plan for a custom enclosure never panned out

Needless to say, there was some decent legwork already done on this project before it got shelved. With all that in mind though, I decided to take a new stab at it this year. I really wanted to stick as close as I could to the R1 formula, but I was also far more budget constrained when I originally tried this. The industry has moved on and standardized around more specific sizing and parts. I’m not fighting it as much this time. Knowing that, I’ve decided to overhaul the drive train in particular.

• My 50mm motors have to go sadly.
• The bent axle trucks are also going since they’re a safety hazard.

It is incredibly difficult to find esk8 trucks that aren’t obnoxiously wide now. Really frustrating in fact. The riptide hangers are about 7ish inches with extended axles to allow for slim bearing pulleys. Total width is just over 10 inches. Most of the DIY stuff I’m finding is extended longboard trucks. 12in+. That would look and feel AWFUL on this deck.

My best solution ended up being: Meepo Voyager trucks. They’re just over 11 inches wide total, come with integrated mounts, and can take tapered axle pulleys. Not my perfect setup, but they were affordable enough, and they’ll take my new motors.

Whichhhhhh, brings me to the motors. The flipskys won’t mount to ANYTHING that I can find. I don’t have access to a CNC for new mounting plates like I did last time. For now anyway. The voyager trucks are forcing me to industry standard 63mm motors. I just happened to get a promotion at work last month, so I splurged a little. I picked up a set of Radium Performance 6455s, mostly because they’re really pretty. I went with 175kv, because like the video said, I’m not a speed guy. I like torque and acceleration, and I never really ride more than 17-18mph anyway.

So that’s the new plan. Overhaul the drivetrain, figure out what to do about the enclosure, and get this thing on the road.

Any feedback? Am I making a huge mistake trusting meepo trucks? Are the radium’s way overkill for my little Undertow? Are the spare BKB trucks I bought a mistake too if I’m eyeing them for the next home of my 50mm Flipsky’s?

Find out next time!

[SeeTheBridges]

Another week by, some more key parts have arrived! First up was my 16T motor pulleys from Radium Performance. It wasn’t my first choice since this is a torque build, not speed. But I couldn’t find any decently priced local 14/15T’s that I liked. I’ll probably revisit this later, but for now they’ll be great.

I’ve got a long weekend, so I’ve gone ahead and started some assembly for tonight. The new Meepo trucks and Radium motors look SICK. AND they’re only negligibly heavier than the old ones. The red bushings with the red phase wires are just CHEFS KISS .

I had a little chat with Mr @Tony_Stark and we realized my old MakerX SV4 dual has a nonstandard sensor pinout. I feel like this was a known issue with this model that I’ve just long forgotten about. Anyway, that was a quick fix, I flipped 4 wires on the JST and I should be good to go for first boot up and motor config. I’d prefer to remount the connector since it’s actually just flipped the wrong way for VESC6 and current model compatibility, but I don’t feel like slicing up the shrink wrap on it.

That’s all for this week! I’ve got an OEM Riptide battery box on the way from Jking to make my housing situation easier. It’s all coming together wonderfully! I can’t wait to blow up my ESC on the first ride lmao. If you’d like to follow along in realtime, I post progress pics on my Instagram story, but they’ll end up here too as I finish this bad boy off.

Till next time~~

[SeeTheBridges]

Welp. Lots of things have gone wrong since last time. Turns out this DV4 only provides 3.3V on both the sensor and UART ports, so it’s not only a nonstandard layout, but nonstandard power delivery too. What a pain. I’ll just work around it and pull 5V from the PPM ports at the top of each side.

The real setback this week was finding out the battery box I ordered is the wrong size. I incorrectly assumed that the JKing HB2 was identical to the original Riptide. It looks EERILY similar, but it turns out its battery box is like half size. Oops.

Welp, like I said on instagram, time to move to plan b. I’m gonna give a 3D printed and reinforced battery enclosure a shot. If that fails spectacularly, I just got access to a woodshop again, so maybe I’ll humor a fully wooden enclosure like I originally envisioned. We’ll see.

Progress is gonna have to slow to a crawl while I reconfigure my small studio apartment for this bit fingers crossed this goes well, I want to try it before the seasons over!

[b264]

Make a fiberglass enclosure. Use a 3D print as a form if needed. Epoxy doesn’t stick to plastic garbage bags or packing tape.

[SternWake]

My HB-2 came with a 7s2p. I was trying to figure out a way to get a 10s1p of 21700 cells in there, and decided it wasn’t happening without routing clearance on the deck belly, or a thick gasket.

Now I’m just turning it into a portable charger, 7s2p boosting to 42v.

[SeeTheBridges]

Howwwwww involved would that process be? I’m only leaning towards a 3D print since I don’t really have space for more equipment. The wood shop access was a bit of a surprise, but I feel like a well constructed wooden box may be better than a print strength wise.

[b264]

You can do a one-off with chip brushes. Elbow grease is enough.

[sevenfloorsdown]

I loved my Riptide! Unfortunately, it’s hard to get things into that enclosure. I eventually learned how to make fiberglass enclosures and made one for my Riptide (it’s rough, I know but I was experimenting with something for this one).

Here’s what mine looks like now. Note the bolt pattern (Philips, I know. I had a bag I needed to use up; they’re M5). I obviously trimmed the deck.

10S1P P42A single stack, Maker-X DV4s. With Bluetooth and circuitry for integrated lights.

EDIT: deck art is my own painting (retouched) with fritted resin.

[sevenfloorsdown]

You lay the fiber, then brush the resin on. Do enough layers, it cures in under an hour. There will be video tutorials how to lay fiberglass on odd shapes. Sand as needed. I was lazy sanding mine but this is the experiment board. I did the the fiberglass on 3D print on a different board.

The 3D print strength no longer matters as thick enough fiberglass by itself is strong enough. In case of my Riptide, I think I did 3 layers. It’s small, doesn’t have to support much weight, and doesn’t flex.

[SeeTheBridges]

Welcome back everyone! In honor of the downtime ending, here’s my little update for the month!

For a start, I’ve been out on the trail way more than I should be if I ever wanna finish this thing this year. I pulled 41 miles riding all over the city all day! And I may or may not have busted a hall sensor on my RS Pro as a result. Oops. Really wishing I had ordered spares to keep on hand. Lesson learned.

I’m back on the 3D printing idea. I just couldn’t bring myself to commit to dealing with hazardous resin fumes, and needing a respirator to work with fiberglass. Plus I already own all the 3D printing gear so I’m gonna give this a real shot first before I inevitably need to fiberglass it.

The design needs a little refining and this first round of prints had a feed rate issue on one side of the printer from suboptimal spool placement. But it’s mostly a fit check since I forgot to add a charging port and power button hole.

Gonna be a tight squeeze, but it’s looking good! I broke out a bunch of my soldering supplies this week, so I’ll be working on the 5V power issue next. Gonna make a JST bus bar basically and steal the power from the PPM pads. Fingers crossed it all works! Otherwise I’m scrapping this ESC and gonna use my backup FSESC minis.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be pouting while I wait for a new hobbywing motor instead of skating. stupid hall sensors making my left wheel cog and have no braking power.

[b264]

@SeeTheBridges

stupid hall sensors making my left wheel cog and have no braking power.

Turn off the sensors or use HFI

[SeeTheBridges]

It’s a prebuilt using a hobbywing ESC. I have 0 customizable options unfortunately.

[SeeTheBridges]

Tiny bonus update. It’s raining today, so I can’t move much further, but here’s the plan for the top of the enclosure!

This one was a fail since I freehanded the mounting holes, but I’ve got enough scrap for like 4 more attempts. Going with steel threaded inserts and M5 through hole bolts. Gonna keep the 3D printed side walls under compression to hopefully avoid any catastrophic failures. Plus the woods gonna look really cool when I stain and seal it.

I also gave all the components a quick squeeze into the shell to make sure they’d fit. It looks like it’ll JUST about work. I’m gonna be sure to insulate any exposed metallic surfaces before final assembly, but I was a little worried it wouldn’t all fit. More confident now.

[sevenfloorsdown]

Those walls look too thick. I don’t know how you’ll fit the switch and the charging port.

One of my challenges with the Riptide is how to fit things and I never went thicker than 3mm with enclosures.

[glyphiks]

Can just pocket the walls where those things go to make them thin out to suit

[rafaelinmissouri]

This is really sweet.

I love the Art too!!!

[SeeTheBridges]

I made them pretty thick for additional strength to be fair. I honestly have fully decided where I’m gonna stick the power button and charge port. Near the base of the battery is probably the most faithful placement to the original, but I am also skeptical it would fit there. It does feel like there’s JUST enough wiggle room to mount them at the front where I have them dangled, but I’d be a little worried about the battery breaking the solder joints.

[SeeTheBridges]

I should wait till I have more progress, but frankly this took 3 tries over the last week and I’m so proud I made it work lmao. The previous 2 attempts would’ve looked something like this:

Marking the holes with a punch indent wasn’t good enough. I ended up drilling pilot holes first, using 2 screws to index the taped up 3D print walls in 2 opposing corners. This finally gave me enough precision for the steel screw inserts to engage.

This housing was the biggest hurdle to finishing this project off, butttttt I think I just hit feature creep. I was going to use a Flipsky VX1 I had lying around for the remote, but I ran into the whole 3.3V bus being my only accessory VBUS again. Damn thing wants 5V like everything else . Then I saw the GB Remote Lite build thread. For those of you that remember, I’m the crazy person that was building and selling Firefly Remotes and kits way back when. I’ve got a LOT of leftover parts from that endeavor, so naturally, I wanna build one for this board now. Ordered SLIGHTLY different parts than the BOM, but I’m hoping it’ll be a shortcut! What could go wrong?

Oh, the bonus of going with the GB Remote is that the receiver can use 3.3V to power the receiver. This way I can have a MT05 Bluetooth module for auto ride tracking on one side that only needs 3.3V, and a GB receiver on the other for control and on remote telemetry.

If I just end up going sensorless, than this project will effectively be done. I did throw together a 5V bus bar extension, but it feels kind of excessive at this point. I may still try and cram them in too because I’d really PREFER having sensors, but they’re no longer gonna be a mission critical priority.

In hindsight, I should’ve just ditched this ESC. It’s too much trouble. Oh well. I’m committed now.

Anyone have ideas for how I can make a gasket for the edges? I’m thinking a ton of suguru.

Till next time!

[sevenfloorsdown]

I use a lot of closed cell or EVA foam. Definitely not waterproof but squishing it keeps splashes out.

[b264]

Butyl rope is endgame for waterproofing enclosures