Skater5D is a skate assistant (for skateboards and not to be confused with roller skates) and it uses a set of 2 rails mounted onto the bottom of your skateboard that you can easily attatch and detatch to analzye your tricks! It uses 2 sensors and the microcontroller being used is the ESP32 S3 Mini-1 and it uses 2 sensors, a BMP sensor which can tell the altitude and can detect airtime, and a MPU sensor to detect movement and acceleration. The firmware is written in micropython and the schematic and PCB design is all in Kicad. The CAD software used is Onshape.
I made this because I am a skateboarder (besides the fact that Im not that good), simply I like to skateboard and try out new tricks, using this lighweight (on a relative scale to other products) design that I made I can perfect my tricks easier. I also made this to help other skateboarders, and even professional ones, because this can track the airtime and other statistics, not just your tricks. This was a pain to make but in the end I think it was worth making it, It also uses different sensors and concepts, perfect for me to learn hardware related content. I also made this to promote the skateboarding community with coding, combining 2 of my interests!
Pictures:
I learnt a great deal from the making of this project, but in general the key takeaways I had was to do with PCB designing and a lot of stuff related to wiring and general electronics, I had to do a lot of studying on circuits to make sure everything is wired correctly and I almost ended up short circuiting a lot of stuff. I also had a lot of learning to do with JLCPCB and PCB's in general. I learned a lot about CSV formatting and how to find parts for cheap (which is an art, it is NOT easy to find cheap parts haha). Overall this provided me with a really strong foundation over hardware.
(ps: routing is a pain)
- Samhith