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Week 42, 2026: the plan
This week One job, in a shorter week than usual: weld the rover frame. The frame The rover is designed and the steel for the frame is cut. The whole rover in the model, with the pole drawn short to fit the picture: The saw The …read more
Week 41, 2026: the plan
The rover The rover is two-wheeled and self-balancing, built around a single battery module from a Mitsubishi i-MiEV electric car and two 6.5" hoverboard hub motors. The module lies flat between the wheels in a welded steel tub …read more
Week 40, 2026: the plan
The jack worked Last week's plan had one goal: get the traction battery out of the i-MiEV without a lift. It came out. The cradle, two Biltema scissor jacks in a welded ladder of 30 mm box section on four castors, took the weight …read more
Week 39, 2026: the plan
The Mitsubishi i-MiEV I like these cars. This is the third one I have owned. The same car was also sold as the Peugeot iOn and the Citroën C-Zero. It is a golf cart you can commute in: it does motorway speeds, more or less, seats …read more
Week 26, 2026: roundup
The plan for this week was a single bar: prove the runtime-config path end to end, set one config value on a real board from the configurator and read it back. That round trip is not finished. The on-board half of it got built …read more
Unbricking hoverboard controllers: not dead, just asleep
While building runtime-hal, my one-binary-runs-on-any-chip HAL, I started bricking GD32F130C8 hoverboard controllers, and the pile kept growing. The pattern was deceptive. The test firmware would be flashed with the board running …read more
Shopping list, 22 June 2026
A batch of parts is going into the cart for the hoverboard firmware bring-up. These are not recommendations I am handing down from on high, they are the things I am actually about to buy for the bench. The links are affiliate …read more
Week 26, 2026: the plan
Two different hoverboards are on the bench this week, and the point of the picture is that they are different. On the left, a split board: each wheel driven by its own little controller, the two halves wired together. On the …read more