Hoverboard Product

Overview

A hoverboard is a self-balancing scooter: two motorized wheels under a split deck that the rider steers by leaning. There are no handlebars and no throttle. The board stands itself upright and moves only because a controller is constantly measuring how the rider is tilting it and driving the wheels to keep its own deck level.

The board is built on the Chassis & Shell, a two-piece shell joined at a center pivot so the left and right foot pads can rotate independently of each other. Each side carries one Hub Motor Wheel, a gearless in-wheel brushless motor with the tire molded straight onto the rim. All of the intelligence sits on the Mainboard, which reads the rider through the frame's own motion sensor plus a Foot Sensor Board under each pad, then drives both wheels. Energy comes from the Battery Pack, and a Lighting & Audio Module module adds headlights and a Bluetooth speaker.

How it works

Balancing is a continuous control loop. An inertial measurement unit on the Mainboard measures the pitch angle and rotation rate of the chassis hundreds of times a second. When the rider leans forward, the deck tips forward; the controller sees that tilt and commands the wheels to roll forward to drive the deck back under the rider. Lean harder and the wheels spin faster to chase the larger error, which is what the rider feels as accelerating. Lean back and the loop reverses to brake or reverse. The board is never balanced once and left alone — it is falling and catching itself many times a second.

Steering comes from the split deck. Each Foot Sensor Board watches its own foot pad through a gyro and a pair of optical presence switches. Because the two pads pivot independently around the chassis center axle, tilting one pad forward while keeping the other flat makes the controller spin one wheel faster than the other, turning the board. The presence switches also act as a safety interlock: both pads must report a foot before the motors will arm.

Each Hub Motor Wheel is driven by its own three-phase MOSFET bridge on the mainboard. The controller energizes the stator coils in sequence while three Hall sensors report rotor position, so the field always pulls the magnet ring the right way — gearless electronic commutation, the same scheme used in the Hub Motor Wheel of an electric scooter. Phase current is sensed through shunt resistors so the controller can limit torque and protect the transistors.

The Battery Pack is a 36 V lithium-ion pack with its own battery management board guarding against over-discharge, overcurrent, and cell imbalance, and a protected charge inlet at the Charge Port feeds it from a wall adapter.