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LBS modeled in Autodesk Inventor

…and in real life

In another example of what happens when parts coalesce upon a wheeled storage utility at MITERS, I’ve decided to combine the treads of a scrapped industrial snowblower with the body of a scrapped, definitively non-industrial skateboard.

The initial plan was to have the machine employ dual fingers-free control for tank steering, developed originally for the RazErBlades (the board itself is not involved in the vehicle control).  Two rewound Turnigy 80/85 ICBMs were to propel the vehicle at up to 25 to 30 miles per hour across all sorts of terrain. Originally designed for rapid transport during the brutal Arctic winter, the project will continue until it finishes, no matter how un-snowy it might be.

The first “version” of the finished vehicle instead uses conventional DC brush motors for ease of control, combined with a custom H-bridge motor driver. For starters, LBS uses a pistol-grip remote similar to those used on R/C cars. Because the stock tracks and track sprockets from the snowblower were used, the wheelbase was forced to be artificially short. The vehicle takes a little practice to ride due to its very high center of gravity when a rider is standing on it, and alot of forward-backward lean intervention is needed. This means it is also a good candidate for a quasi-Segway-like (self-stabilizing) controller. Eexperiments will continue into the fingers-free control, lean and weight shift control, and other methods of haphazardly commanding a vehicle.

LBS’s build thread for your amusement.

Specifications

Video links of LBS are below: