Updates

Haven't had time to work much on my rocket. The bigger problem is the space. My small apartment doesn't have much room for hobbies :(.

Thesis research is eating all of my time. Hundreds of hardware and software problems have put me behind schedule about 3 months, pushing graduation off another semester.

Exciting stuff in the news, though. Apparently I'm a trend setter. There are some commercial electric hubmotor longboards hitting the market now!  M1 (formerly Monolith), Mellow, Next Board, Eon, Stary, Acton Qu4tro and Blink. The Acton Qu4tro is really the embodiment of what I set out to achieve with ELB (which ended up being a rather poor prototype). A few of the others are what I hoped to achieve with LiteBoard. There's even something like EHB now. Hopefully what I tried and documented helped them avoid the same mistakes. Send me free boards please? Haha. There have also been a bunch of other personal hubmotor longboard builds in the past few years. There's also a large DIY movement that's happened in the past couple years, particularly on Electricskateboard builder forum and electric spheres. Very cool stuff. There's an open source FOC ESC now, and tons of ready made hub motors for sale.

I'll get around to finishing LiteBoard and EHB one day. Some of these new designs coming out will give me some ideas for improving their designs. One of them has a neat design for screwing the hub onto a standard axle...will have to look into that more. Considering how well the technology is maturing, I may just buy one instead of finish LiteBoard. I'm sure I can use the parts for something else.