Yes, I always wear motorcycle helmet, gloves, pants and jacket when I go that fast. I’m certainly not the first person on the forum to do it lol.
By kinks I just meant that I didn’t want to buy anything that doesn’t work very well yet. I just wasn’t sure if this was your final design or if you are still working on it and improving things since you mentioned it was a prototype in your first post.
Not insinuating your remote doesn’t work well, but I know as with any DIY project it sometimes takes a few tries to work out any potential flaws or improvements that can be made.
I think you may have stumbled upon something revolutionary…
If you put that on a slide glove, you could allow the use of a slide puck on both hands! I know people have been trying to integrate remotes into gloves for awhile, I think this may be the solution!
Thanks, glad you like it,
I thought of this idea 
I still prefer the remote, for now, but yeah this can totally be done.
I would have used a smaller battery though, this one lasts way too long and can be made smaller.
I do admit it was a test of my ingenuity to fit that all in that power bank, but if there’s a will there’s a way!
If you do plan to attempt this do let me know.
It took a few iteration to get to this, a lot of things did not work on the way. As I explained above, software serial made my life miserable along the way. I had to do many software changes before it worked as well as it does now, and as I said before too, I do not plan to stop here. You’re right, I do not know if I can sell it this way because I would like to make the casing nicer, but functionality wise I am very happy. Will give the nrf24l01 that @Der6FingerJo suggested as it sounds powerful and I do want this to be as safe as possible.
Be sure to use some capacitors on the power input of the Nrf, the Arduino step down will struggle with the load!
i saw the video but haven’t read the the whole thread. how do you control degrees of throttle and brake? if i wanted to slam on the brakes vs slowly. is it like cruise control for the throttle?
Thanks for the advise
What capacitor do you use (Farad)?
Like that?
http://www.reuk.co.uk/wordpress/electric-circuit/smoothing-capactitors/
Thanks!!
That’s the thing, those sensors know how hard you press. Totally controllable and very intuitive.
Actually only one I had laying around. Maybe 470 microFarad
@ofekp check out @solidgeek’s remote and code if you haven’t already I also made my own remote with basically bare minimum code here: https://github.com/shusain/eskatecontroller
For mine I’m using an arduino pro-mini on both the transmitter and receiver side. Things are stable and work well regarding the arduino’s so long as you are powering them correctly given the clock rate on the arduino you’re using. Regarding the capacitors for the NRF chips believe .1 and 10microFarad is recommended (I used a 100microFarad one and it does seem to help to keep the nrf chip itself stable), more info here: https://arduino-info.wikispaces.com/Nrf24L01-2.4GHz-HowTo
I did an arduino+nrf on the transmitter and receiver side and have PCBs to connect the arduino to the nrf chips that work for both the transmitter and receiver (if interested in trying those out send me a PM with where you’re at and can see what shipping would be, they only cost me a couple dollars a piece to get 100 made, but I have plenty of extras for anyone experimenting). The nrf with the antenna on the board work well for at least 30ft away the ones with external power amplifier (PA) and antenna can go for at least a city block (as far as I could see my RC car from).
One thing to note, I don’t know anything about the FSR sensors but using a potentiometer in my controller and every once in a while I have to replace it or recalibrate things due to drift or things getting messed up with the potentiometer (think humidity changes effect it). Luckily the ‘safe start’ on the VESC and other config basically stops it from getting too horribly dangerous. I’ll likely switch over to using linear hall sensor and magnets similar to solid geeks build.
That’s a neat project, I should really get myself a 3D printer
https://arduino-info.wikispaces.com/Nrf24L01-2.4GHz-HowTo - Lot’s of info that I will use on the next remote 
Seems like those NRFs are the way to go, but I am really trying to avoid using an Arduino as an SPI to I2C/UART converter.
I did find this post http://reboot.love/t/vesc-mods-for-robotics-use/107 It kinda says there’s a flag that can be changed to get the SPI working on the VESC (if I am not mistaking, I think the rest of the code in the GitHub link he shared is unrelated stuff). It does require HW flush and all the pain that comes with it (I imagine) but I think this is worth it 100%.
hall sensor sound much better and should not be susceptible to weather, although, regular potentiometers should not be that sensitive either, no?
Yah the potentiometer was good for a long time but recently when the weather changed here it started acting weird unless I put pressure on it, maybe case of just crappy component or something along those lines just figured I’d put it out there as something to consider. Regarding using the nrf directly on the vesc that sounds like it should work I just didn’t want to deal with modifying the firmware and trying to keep a patch up to date (if it’s just a matter of uncommenting a line perhaps not a big deal). Nice thing about using an Arduino on the receiver side is can bake some extra logic in there like my time out code (vesc also has a timeout though for no signal received, so maybe doesn’t matter). Only issue I’ve had was things going ghost Rider on me when only the mosi pin for SPI got disconnected and the throttle floated high. I worked around that issue by only ever sending 1-254 instead of 0-255 so if it floats high or low I know it’s a bogus value and ignore it (go idle)
I had a version where the Arduino on both side was OK, but since then I added a screen and wanted to communicate with the VESC to get data. As I was adding more functionality, the system was now using two way communication so I needed to use Software Serial (Arduino Nano has only one HW serial) and that got all kinds of weird things going on. Debugging those issue can be hard, when I had the Arduino connected in one previous version (with Software Serial) I got weird behavior where every once in a while the brakes would engage. Actually fell once due to this on slow test speed luckily. And on other dev version I had the throttle engaging randomly, scary stuff right there. I slowly learned that less is more. As for the other changes I would like to do, I can get them programmed on the VESC too. I agree it is easier when you already have an Arduino connected to the board, but again, I think it is worth the effort of loading all this stuff into the VESC itself. If you are using a more powerful Arduino than mine (Nano) you might have more HW serials and you might be OK because of that, keep using the HW, can’t stress that enough.
Gotcha saw the mention of software serial earlier but didn’t grok why you were using it originally. The pro mini are just missing the ftdi and USB connections so saves some space and the ones I have are setup for 8MHz and 3.3V (easier to power off 1S lipo without boost), instead of 16MHz and 5V for the typical Arduino. Ultimately looking at the data sheet for the particular atmega chip on a given Arduino board is the best way to know what it has available.
Anyhow I’m just using the metr Bluetooth module (new version just made I have the old one but will probably upgrade it) for getting data from the VESC but makes more sense with what you want to do to have the direct connection. @solidgeek has “telemetry” data from the VESC sent to it as well so maybe can look over his code too for some ideas of how to do it. I noticed in my testing the response on the 8Mhz Arduino is better when I removed all the serial debugging after things are working.
I certainly don’t have the electrical or programming skills to do that unfortunately, although it would be a pretty cool thing to learn!
Hey, lots of reading that I haven’t done but I’m doing something similar to what you’re doing but not with an FSR (ie arduino in remote -> nrf24L01 -> arduino on the board translating commands for the VESC), and I was using an ESP32s.
I was having issues with the code doing a lot of things at once (mostly in the remote) and remembered that the Esp32 has two cores (actually three). It’s totally worth reading about it. Now one core is responsible for reading buttons, and the other core is responsible for talking to the board.
It’s. So. Fast.
Also the ESP32 has multiple hardware serial ports
It’s mostly used for IOT since it has Wi-Fi, don’t you think this is an overkill? Are you using the WiFi capability? I like the fact that it has multiple cores, though.
Yeah I really need to get some ESP8266 based stuff to see how it works in practice myself. I’ve heard there can be issues with latency from the wifi but I wonder if that is just if using TCP and UDP would be sufficient… anyway I never tried myself and given I’m running the Arduino’s at 8MHz and still works fine I kind of feel like it shouldn’t be that bad to do on a much more powerful chip, that said you do have to feed it more energy so there is that down side. I’ve had lots of luck I guess with the NRF chips, it did take me quite a bit of failing at first but have had a pretty solid setup for a couple of years now so for now just not fixing something that isn’t broken.
I’m not using the Wifi capability.
Plan to (this weekend) use wifi and use Blynk so that I can see some data on my phone that I don’t need in real-time/in-flight.