Battery & ESC -- the most important part for Esk8

[Anderson]

This article was written to quickly learn about skateboard batteries and ESC for skateboarders who don’t plan to build their own skateboards and compare the battery and ESC of commercial boards.

Battery

Batteries have an impact on performance such as torque, speed as well as durability, life-cycle and safety. The quality of a battery pack also affects the significant of voltage sag.

However, it is an overwhelming experience for beginners trying to understand the battery of an electric skateboard. When a beginners gets a battery parameter, they see the terminology of “amperes”, “ampere hours”, “voltage watts”, “10s2p”, “18650 units” and "continuous discharge"that simply makes no sense to someone without a working knowledge of batteries.

So, I will directly compare the skateboards which using Samsung and Sanyo batteries which are the most common batteries on the market to explain the parameters of the battery. First, I will show you a table as following:

	Evolve GTR	Ownboard Carbon AT	Yecoo GT
Battery Brand	Samsung	SANYO	Samsung
Capacity	14Ah	14Ah	15Ah
Range	19 miles	19 miles	21 miles
Discharge Rate	30A	20A	30A
Voltage	36V	36V	36V
Connection	-	10S4P	10S5P

Note: all of the skateboards in the table are all terrain skateboards

According to the above table, battery capacity will affect the cruising range of the skateboard. The larger the battery capacity leads to the wider the cruising range. However, for the battery brand, it is worth mentioning that compared to expensive SANYO battery , Samsung is the better choice when they have same capacity. Battery capacity is definitely one of the most used specification when a company markets their board.It is also a more reliable reflection of the range than the marketed range, and it also shows you if a company is inflating their board’s range.

For voltage, industry standard is 36V. If the voltage is too low, the board will not have enough torque. If the voltage is too high, the motor/ ESC can not handle it. So almost of all skateboards on the market have the same voltage that I needn’t talk about it with more words. The actual issue I’ll discuss is voltage sag mentioned above, which means the speed will be slower when the battery power is low. If it is reduced, the Board will keep going on high speeds even when the battery power is low. The voltage sag is related to the discharge rate. The high discharge rate made the voltage sag reduce.

Series and Parallel are the configuration for how the battery cells are connected. How the cells connect impacts the Voltage and Amperes Hours. On the market, The battery cells is usually connected as 10s2p, 10s3p, 10s4p and 10s5p. It’s the business of the technician.

For the same brand of battery, there will be different models, as far as I am concerned, I think the Samsung 18650 30Q is currently the most cost-effective battery on the market, which can be satisfied by most skateboarders. But Some skateboarders who pursue high-end configuration will use the Samsung 21700 50E, which has high performance, but the cost-effective is worse than 30Q so that 50E can not suitable for common skateboarders.

ESC

ESC(electric speed control) is another core part of electric skateboards. It mainly controls the speed change of the electric skateboard. An excellent ESC electric skateboard will be very smooth when accelerating, and when the bad ESC is accelerating, the speed of the skateboard will suddenly increase, which is very easy to cause wrestling. I only recommend Hobbywing ESC. Hobbywing is specialized in aircraft control panels, and the research on controllers is very good, so its ESC is temporarily irreplaceable in the electric skateboard industry. Most of the best skateboards on the market, such as Ownboard, use Hobbywing ESC.

Conclusion

Battery and ESC are the two important parts for a electric skateboard. Battery is the main power source and ESC is work for controlling the speed. Only when these two parts are selected correctly, will there be a comfortable skateboarding experience。The above content is personal opinion, for reference only, if there is any error, please correct me.

[EEvans]

Hi there. I’m looking to turn my Trampa mountainboard into an electric one.

I’m looking at the obviously ways I can’t power the wheels/what motors/brackets to get that will be correct and fit my mbs matrix (old) trucks.

My other concern is finding the right battery…

I have had this idea to use my Makita batteries that don’t get used much. It feels like a great idea. I have 2 5ah and 3 older 4ah at 18v each.

Say I managed to find a female socket to attach them to an ESC (which?) that would be 2 batteries at 10ah only but equalling the 36v as you mentioned.

What would you say to this ?

[onloop]

Hey Anderson, not a bad effort.

It’s certainly difficult to summarise your topic of choice into a few paragraphs, so you earn some points for writing in a way that somewhat simplifies a complicated topic. This kind of article is great for beginners.

However, I suggest you do some more research about voltage & current and how they relate & maybe update your article with some more detail.

@Anderson

If the voltage is too low, the board will not have enough torque.

that is not entirely true that “low” voltage equals “not have enough torque”.

In an example of a battery that is drained and therefore the voltage heavily depleted compared to its nominal state, the overall performance, the torque, would certainly be noticeably reduced.

However, For example, Take a 6S 5000mah LIPO with 70C discharge, which obviously has a much lower voltage than a 10S or 12S pack, and set it up in a drive system that is designed to have high torque (& lower top speed) Setup the ESC to draw the peak current of battery, in this case, 350amps… Then you certainly would experience massive amounts of torque output. However, the duration of the torque output will be short due to the fact the overall battery capacity in watt-hours is small for an LEV.

The best overall, for performance & safety, for LEV is a large “Wh” pack, with a MAX voltage of up to 50V.

Note: Anything over 50V is considered a safety risk in many countires.

[onloop]

Some articles I wrote many years ago, so some info might be outdated a little.

What is Battery "C" Rating & Is it important for Electric Skateboards?

I remember Fully-Stressing about what parts to buy when I was building my first electric skateboard, mostly because I didn’t have the money to make any mistakes. I wanted to make sure I bought all the correct & best suited parts for the job first time round. I was on a tight budget but I also didn’t want to skimp on the important stuff. One of the most important & expensive parts of your eSk8 build is the battery, so I started to research, I wanted the best bang for my buck based on my knowledg…

LIPO vs LI-ION - Electric Skateboard Battery Chemistry

For me, it was primarily about quality & consistency, followed by longevity & aesthetics. My first few eboard builds were made using Cheap Lipo From Hobbyking… mostly 6S 8000mah Zippy Flight Max Bricks. For the first few builds, they seemed pretty good… but i soon realised there was a problem! they were not all the same, on my fourth or fifth one the quality seemed to drop off, the physical size changed & there were a lot more puffy/bad cells starting to appear when they hadn’t before, i assum…

[Diefbok609]

I’m trying to decide on a 12s3p battery to use in my build… an you give me all the specs for your Mboard 12p3s battery including the continuous output and max output.

I finally started getting some parts together for my build for this spring… So far I’ve bought the FOCBOX Unity, the Flipsky 6374 “battle hardened” motors, torque trucks and 90mm wheels, Dragon “race” bearings, 20t motor pulley and a 32t kegel wheel pulley. Now the last major part I have to choose is the battery… I’m Pretty decided on a 12s3p battery but I’m having an impossible time choosing one… I’ve been looking at the Backfire 12s3p battery and the Mboard 12s3p. do you have any advice on the best 12s3p battery for $400 that will fit my needs. Looking for that 45+mph and 30 mile(ish) range…

Mboard 12s3p Specs

Nominal Voltage: 44.4V Capacity: 9000mAh Power: 388.8Wh Continuous current: ??? Max current: 45A Cells: Samsung 30q

Backfire 12s3p Specs

Voltage: 43.5v Capacity :10.5AH Power: 454WH Continuous current: 30A Peak current :45A Cell: Sanyo NCR18650GA

Thanks man… This build started fun and is now getting a little stressful… def more money then I thought I’d be putting into it… Haha…

Thank you for your time

Rob

[Diefbok609]

Sorry disregard the first paragraph… I was trying to get the continuous current from Mboard with no luck… that’s what I get for copy and pasting

[Diefbok609]

And the curve ball is that I’m running this setup on a 30 inch Meepo Mini 2 deck… 19 inches in between the trucks to fit the battery and FOCBOX… FOCBOX is 3 inches so there is just about 16 inches in length of allowable space for the battery to fit…

Thanks again for any help…