Using the boards from the hoverboard in autopilot.

I have such connectors, but I’m sorry to use them for this. I’ll try mt30.

MT30 will probably be enough, I usually use MT60 on ebike motors that use a bit more power.

I limit the current to 10A at the firmware level, so I’m not worried.

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drives much better after halving the steering rate.

I have a range extender trailer for my Ebike thats built using the same 600x400mm crates that im using for the rover so the generator slots in directly on top so of course i had to test it.

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I bought another faulty hoverboard. totally dead and wont power on even with a different battery so I suspect its the TIP127 main power transistor not letting power into the board, apparently its a common fault on them. so i have ordered a pack of them to hopefully get the board up and running and get 4WD.

As a bonus its got a new battery in it from the previous owners attempted repair.

I have been looking at the hoverserial.ino arduino serial interface and it does provide a lot of very useful telemetry from the controller and a nice serial interface for sending it RC commands.

this is essentially your 2 channels getting sent to the hoverboard
int16_t steer;
int16_t speed;

what it thinks the 2 channels are getting commanded to do
int16_t cmd1;
int16_t cmd2;

wheel RPM
int16_t speedR_meas;
int16_t speedL_meas;

voltage and temperature
int16_t batVoltage;
int16_t boardTemp;

native support would be nice but in the mean time an arduino adapter might be the way to go or even straight lua.

This winter I tried using uart, only on esp32; In the receiver on the display I got the speed, voltage.

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Good news, the first hoverboard that i managed to short out came back to life! turns out it was just 2 damaged mosfets on one of the motor drives that had shorted out, swapped them out with 2 from an old ebike controller and its back up and running!

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Got all 4 motor running ! I also made a proper wiring harness so the 18v feed goes into the UBEC via a diode from each board to run the receiver so i can run either pair of wheels.

Done some testing at the beach on soft sand, it handles it surprisingly well

Limited throttle

Full power

I’ve often wondered, could these motors/ controllers swing a prop?..

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I suspect you would overheat the motors with a high sustained load like that.

Got a flight controller installed, its a spare omnibusf4pro i had for a vtol. I cant use the built in power sensors as im runing a 13s 20AH battery so il have to figure out something else at some point, il probably just replace it with something better suited like a pixhawk or matek f7. its got frsky passthrough telemetry and a HC-05 bluetooth module for uploading missions.

Unfortunately the weather is not cooperating so i wont get to test to til probably tomorrow.

Waterproof sr04 on the front to test avoidance.

First test with the GPS

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I tried on ELSR and Pixhawk, the range was more than 1000 meters (along with telemetry). The ESP-NOW managed to manage 500 m.

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@Yuri_Rage has a mavlink esp-now bridge, im wondering if it can be combined with some mavlink RC override code and ppm or SBUS input to build an RC / telemetry system out of it, it would be ideal for rovers.

my test pilot approves the rover

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How about the ESP8266 wifi telemetry β€” Copter documentation with a joystick ? - More or less the same thing as ESP-Now

Either would work, its possible to do it with mission planner but having a laptop in the middle just to convert a transmitter to mavlink is a bit excessive.

Mission Planner for Android ?

I just had a look, the option is there but mission planner for android is not the most stable software, if it crashes you would loose your rc control.

I was thinking just to change missions etc rather than control, which would be still under RC control