Fast progress as unusual

The controllers are all working now thanks to Shane. And the problems were, drumroll please... 100% my fault! I guess I shouldn't be surprised. This was my first time hand-soldering  (w/o a reflow oven) tiny surface-mount components. And the second board only had 1 issue, so I was obviously getting better at it (I'm still bad at it though...need more practice). Basically just a bunch of poor solder joints, crossed pads, and toasted resistors caused a few components to die - luckily nothing major. The next step is re-timing them (because we messed with the timing so much trying to troubleshoot them). After that, it's programming the handheld controller.

I'm testing the polyurethane glue's ability to make strong butt-joints right now...we'll see how it turns out in a few hours. 5-minute epoxy was too brittle and just snapped at the joint when I tried to bend it. The whole point of this is to see if I can cut the / off of one end of my tire strips and make a /\ on one end and a |\/| on the other (thanks for the tip, josh!). The V joint should get rid of the sliding problem when gluing on the tires. If it doesn't work, I'll have wasted $160 worth of polyurethane sheet, and instead of buying another sheet of it, I'll probably invest in casting materials and cast the right shape tires. Too bad my design doesn't allow me to retrofit mountainboard tires to the wheels.

Speaking of mountainboard wheels, here's a tease frame of what is to come:

"Hmm...looks like a normal mountainboard wheel." Can you spot the difference?