They are offering a Geared Hub motor electric skateboard. Interestingly enough it has only one motor!, it also looks like it is probably using a 6 Cell LIPO battery. It is coming straight out of china! With a crazy price starting at $399 it will probably be popular… the price of $399 was for the first 20 only which are now sold. So for everyone else its now $499.
They advertise a retail price of $899
Also, Just a few months ago The Monolith InBoard recently raised $420K on Kickstarter, it was one of the first to the market advertising the Hub Motor for electric skateboard, they are currently behind schedule and no one from Inboard has proven that their hub motors will have enough power to satisfy.
I did back this one and plan on purchasing it. Can’t beat the price. Nice 8.2lbs option.
I’ve actually thought about backing all the other options but decided against it since the price was pretty much double the price and nothing significant as far as features and new tech.
Nice thin board is pretty sweet. I’d be surprised if this goes up the 30 degree inclines it mentions.
Weird. It’s a miniature planetary reduction gear like they would use in monster trucks, but with only two planetary gears instead of three or four and not much of a reduction. They look the same size as the sun gear. Maybe because the whole thing’s backwards and the gears are for load bearing and not reduction? And boy are those windings thick, like you would find in a higher KV. I’ll bet they get hot.
Damn sexy though. Wish I had the extra cash to back one.
My concerns would be heat and impact on this design. Motors run hot and insulating them is going to trap that heat. More so though, look at the impact and forces associated with skate wheels. a lot of that force is absorbed by the wheel and the deformation of the wheel actually helps preserve energy.
looks like an outrunner to me but the planetary gear means the shaft can rotate faster than the outer shell. I would guess that the shaft has an extra set of bearings on the rear to allow for this independent rotation.
The more I look at it, the more it looks like it doesn’t do anything. If the rotor is attached to the axle then the speed of the rotor will match the axle with or without the reduction gears. If its an inrunner then it’s working by reducing the rpms to an outer shell (which the urethane mounts to).
…But an inrunner’s stator doesn’t look like that. Where are the magnets? If they were on the axle, their circumference would be too small to offer any kind of torque.
This drawing would make sense if the axle stuck out the other side and had a pulley on it, wrapped in a belt, which was hugging another pulley that was bolted to a wheel haha!
I can only assume that this is for “illustration purposes” because as it is it doesn’t do anything.
I found this image of some real parts.
The only way I can visualise this working is if the outrunner had another barrel, around the outside of its barrel, seated with two large bearings either end.
So then you have two barrels. The one with magnets attached. The other joined to the big gear.
Now we’re talking. I disliked hub motors b/c there was no gearing which limits the kind of torque you can put on the wheel. With something like this… you could use 12s and do a 1:8 gear ratio :P.
I’m not convinced that a geared hub motor for eSk8 is better than a non-geared hub motor. Only time will tell. Maybe both options will be worse than just having a belt drive.
I tend to get the feeling that a lot of these kickstarter campaigns focus on “being the first” and not so much on being the BEST.
Gimmicks are great for sales.
From a marketing point of view it is important to bring an exciting new technology to the market. It helps build hype. It could be the difference between getting the funding or not!. So it doesn’t necessarily bring the best technology to the market it just brings the most exciting, most marketable product to the market…
So i think the problem is these campaigners put more focus on marketing then testing.
Simple! just make a video going up a large steep hill. Have a video data logger, like the vesc has, showing the Speed. Motor current or watts. Motor temp.
Inboard hasn’t done.
stary hasn’t done it.
mellow hasn’t done it.
I say, If your products are so good just prove it with video.
I’m still not convinced either but I think it’s a step forward.
Being the first is always part of the process and can make or break you. Sheeett… Take a look at Microsoft and Apple.
Microsoft has always taken reign over Apple for so long it’s not even funny.
Only now are Apple fanboys enjoying the Apple products but look how long it took them to create a better product. How many countless iterations.
No matter, what we still have the differences between light weight and long distance versus lightweight and short distance.
If you want below 10lbs -> Single motor + 6 mile range. That’s it. Current technology can only support that.
If you want 15lbs -> Dual motor + 12 mile range. That’s it…
Sure, you can nit pick a few lbs 1-2 lbs. Perhaps maybe a 12lb board for a dual motor + 12 mile range and/or a dual motor 20 mile for 15 lbs.
Without marketing there is no revenue, without no revenue there is no R&D and/or funding to build new and more advanced products.
Most of these backers from crowd funding don’t seem to care much about data logs. That’s not what they are interested in it’s simply just the looks and/or features. They don’t know anything about what they need to climb 20-30* hills and/or similar. I assume, most people don’t have to climb 2030* hills and most people are on flat ground. If that’s the case then the boards will work great for them.
Anyone here who is a backer that can give us some inside info from the kickstarter page?
They should really work on their advertising and social media platforms…
It’s still lacking some critical information, also the 90 day warranty is kinda odd…
@Onloop: to revive the question you asked a long time ago and partially answered, Stary confirmed what you postulated. I sketched it out, then asked in the Kickstarter questions. So yes, there are two barrels moving in opposite directions. The CAD graphic is accurate and not just an illustration. The tricky part was figuring out that the axle of the truck is “sawed off”; it ends in a squat ziggurat-shaped heatsink thing to which the carrier holding the planet gears are attached, and the stator is mounted to this.
The inner barrel is the rotor, and is connected by the hubcap to an axle (not the truck axle!) which goes through the stator and ends in the sun gear.
Pretty darn cool if you ask me. I didn’t get any answers on how they prevented collision between the spinning barrels (moving in opposite directions, as you said), and whether this gap needed lubrication. If you look closely, you’ll notice that the outer barrel has to be pretty damn rigid, since its contact surface with the transmission is only on the inner rim. The rest of the barrel “floats” - there seems to be no support or bearing on the outer side. Any materials people out there who could judge on how big a problem this might be? Even if the barrel is extremely resistant to deformation, urethane, and whatever is used to adhere the urethane to the barrel, is by definition not.
Would this give more traction on the inner lip and less towards the outer? If you look at the last video, this would seem to be the case: https://youtu.be/ShvdaRMiF2k?t=91 . Check out the difference in dirty/clean areas of the drive wheel compared to the front wheel.
@Sebastian The only “extra” info that backers would possess are some extra photos of parts in production: circuit bords of the remote, and some shots of the board that was thrown off a chimney. At this point, no one knows where they are with certification. They talk about a lot of 30 pre-production boards that will be used for testing, so we can assume they are not assembled yet either…this is gleaned from the KS questions page.
