What are the current bottlenecks in esk8?

ESK8 Electronics
22

Personally I think its the motors/power train.

Everything is a compromise with motors, and they’re just so big, getting them to fit in setups and mounted you run into so many restrictions.

Direct Drive is Awesome, but hub motors are awful due to the restrictions of wheels and also the terrible urethane depth and lesser urethane quality.

Direct drive inline with wheels is incredible, But then you no longer have any room for an actual truck and your motors are very close to the ground.

Belt-chain drives get rid of some of those problems, but they have their own can of worms.

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23

Battery weight. We need the same batteries except not heavy.

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24

Batteries are the weakest link in most applications. Heres to portable fission in the future

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25

I gotta say reliability, especially in the motor and battery departments.

Motors take a lot of abuse being so close to the ground and depending on the use case can get overly hot or knock into something and shatter a magnet or damage a bearing. Batteries only last a few years of heavy use before decreasing in capacity and are not a very good investment imo.

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26

Reliability is a big, huge problem, but it’s currently solvable – people just don’t want to pay for it.

Battery weight is the biggest bottleneck that isn’t solved yet.

If you had a choice to buy a $1000 new car that worked awesome for the first 5 miles but then breaks down, you wouldn’t buy that. But people think it’s okay for esk8, for some reason.

There is one company treating esk8 engineering as automotive engineering… can’t wait to see what they produce.

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27

What exactly to we stand to gain from lighter batteries? They only amount to a small percentage of the overall vehicle weight so there wouldn’t be any performance gain. The only thing we get from that is less muscles. Do you mean a greater energy density? that takes into account volume and then we can start cramming MAh onto boards and cruise from here to LA without a recharge

28

My boards are over half or more battery weight, and I’d make them even bigger if they weren’t so heavy.

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29

Sure, but the weight doesnt really mattter? Like why not go heavier? the performance of the board (Acceleration/braking etc) doesnt really change since even 10 lbs on batteries are only 5% of a 200lb rider/board setup.

30

I don’t really feel as though we have reached bottlenecks. I think the biggest bottleneck is our creativity. These things are effing amazing.

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31

I think what @b264 means is he wants more Ah on his board so we can go longer without a recharge and dump more Watts into our motors. At least thats’ what I meant with energy density. Can’t beat good ol gasoline in that regard

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32

Umm, because I’m not this guy

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Seriously, I thought that was obvious. Clearly, you’ve only ever used an esk8 as a toy, and not as a tool to get you around.

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33

Gasoline probably does have the most watt*hours per gram, but it comes with a side-effect of ruining your children’s air.

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35

I think you just didn’t finish your meals when you were a kid.

36

I don’t think your boards don’t have an average use-case. Really, I don’t think most people here are going to be average users.

Advancements in batteries I don’t think is really going to increase the number of people interested in spending their money Eskate.

I think for that its waterproofing, reliability, and lifetime and that sort of stuff.

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37

I agree that waterproofing, reliability, refueling are all challenges that we face. There are however solutions to all of these with our available resources.

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38

Waterproofing is definitely very doable currently. It’s not really a bottleneck if you want to do it.

Although most folks confuse that with “water resistance” which is not the same thing. Ideally, you have a moderate amount of water resistance and a very high amount of waterproofing.

Waterproofing is the one that matters after water has already gotten inside. Because it always does, eventually.

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39

How do you get around waterproofing the motor and gear train assuming a belted setup?

40

Well I can tell you have tried hummie hubs. You’ve likely ridden $40 a piece cheap china hubs… You can’t make decent urethane for that even… Get the right stuff and you will fly over cracks, pebbles, and shitty road. But most of the market is crap.

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41

The motor you have to use conformal coating on the sensor board and any low-voltage wiring. It helps on the high-voltage phase wires and terminations, but isn’t absolutely necessary. It is absolutely necessary for the sensor assembly.

A sensorless motor is rather waterproof as-is.

Except bearings… those will need replaced after a certain amount of time.

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42

Not sure waterproofing the gear train matters.But for motors I think they already take a beating, it isn’t like you’re going to submerge the motors in the rain. My batteries have more problems in the rain than the motors, I think the bearings are the biggest problem in the motors in the rain.

1 Like