Want to build your own electronic transportation device? Faraday Motion wants to teach you how to do so in a very short period of time, both through simple, open engineering and an upcoming webinar.
We covered Faraday Motion’s electric longboard, which made an appearance at Autodesk’s booth at the San Mateo Maker Faire this past May. The company came together after a group of like-minded individuals from the United States, Poland, and Sweden decided to combine their talents and create an open, modular platform to empower people to create unique personal electric vehicles.
The longboard is controlled by a smartphone app and allows users to cruise at speeds up to 25 km/hr. The entire board was designed using an array of Autodesk products, with the electronics designed on 123d.circuits.io and the complete design files available on Autodesk 123D. Most of the structural parts for the Maker Faire version were 3D printed in PLA on an Ultimaker 2, while the bracket for the disc brakes was 3D printed in metal. Their hardware, 3D models and tools are all released under CC License – Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International. And their software will be released GPLv2 at a later date. They also have a dual licensing scheme available. You can check out the prototype and features in the video below.
To make it even easier for others to build their open API electric skateboard, Faraday Motion is hosting a webinar on August 1st, at 3pm CET (Central European Time) to show you how to do it. During the live-streamed workshop, viewers will learn how to build the electric skateboard, learn a bit about Faraday Motion’s mission to empower ordinary mortals to create their own personalized vehicles, and have a chance to ask their team any questions about how they, too, can use Faraday Motion’s “advanced LEGO bricks” to create a super-powered skateboard. And, according to the company, building the skateboard should take no longer than 2 hours!
