The objective of this project was to make a functional and
compact and portable for daily, short commuting for college students and/or local travelling. The project was intended to provide personalization and budgeting, by providing a Do-It-Yourself concept, where picking individual parts from various offshore vendors would provide significant cost-reducing alternatives to current market products. However, in my build, the focus of the project was to design everything around the form of the penny board, as the board was exactly the size needed for both conveniences and comfort while keeping the overall project in a competitive price range.

As this was an independent project, I was responsible for the whole build, that includes the troubleshooting, research, sourcing, and failures of the build. Everything used were improvised or alternatives to the top-rated products to stay as far away from the budget as possible. This included the hardware and tools used, the tools were bought from Harbor freight and if included in the budget, it would've pushed significantly closer to the budget. In addition, all the component, ESC, battery, and controller were sourced from Banggood, which is a Chinese reseller, as this insured to be the lowest price online, while not compromising too much on the durability and performance. Originally, I had hoped this project to become something that would look like a professional project with the reliability of Toyota or Honda, the reality of it is nowhere close. While the build does work as for who it was made for, It only worked well for them, as anyone above 125 pounds would encounter scraping of the enclosure, which I've made from a baking pan, and slipping of the pulley belt. If you also have a physique build greater than 125 pounds, you could just barely climb a hill steeper than 15 degrees. As stated, this project turned out to cost more than it was worth for a product, and kits are being sold that would provide better reliability than this while being around the same price points or cheaper (If you lack the resource).

Process

Two challenges came from this project. First is the researching and planning of the resources needed to complete this project, where I had to pick components that will work in tandem to achieve my goals. The other challenges of this project, that I brought upon myself, was that I had to design a custom mounting bracket where the drive train would be positioned so that it would serve both functionality and portability that I was hoping for. Given all the off-shelf components were compatible with each other, the assembly for this project was straight forward.

As a result of this being my first independent project, I obtained valuable technical skills such as development planning and budgets management, along with refining my capabilities of critical thinking and presenting reasonable solutions. From this, I could apply transferable skills of research and information gathering, time management, and accountability into my future projects.