Controlling Hoverboard Motors
Controlling Hoverboard Motors
2022
This was a project I wanted to share because it only ended in utter failure and explosions, but I did learn a few things.
​
My main goal in trying to control these Hoverboard motors was to reuse as many parts as I could from some broken Hoverboards I got for cheap online. I did not want to repair the Hoverboards as they are prone to spontaneous combustion and I did not have a need for one, but they're great for robotics projects!
​
I tried to get these motors to run through various methods. I firstly tried inputting my own input signal on the signal-receiving daughterboard. After that didn't work I tried to hack wires onto the MOSFET drive directly on the PCB. After that one also didn't work I tried building my own driver with an Arduino as the MOSFET driver and controller.
​
I could have hacked into the Hoverboard UART and reprogrammed it to do what I wanted, but that was honestly too much programming work for me. I wanted to try and challenge myself to do this electrically in order to learn something.
None of these methods worked in the end, so I ended up just paying $15 for a 300W BLDC motor controller online, which was much easier than all my other methods.
The daughterboard is the small board tucked away under your feet in the unit which can tell when you step on it and how far you're angling the Hoverboard. These two variables control on/off and speed respectively. I was able to turn the motors on and off, but the only way to control them was by tilting the daughterboards up and down. This is because of how the Hoverboard operates its speed by the user leaning back and forwards (but I used this in my OneWheel build!). The accelerometer was also I2C based, which I didn't feel like hacking into.
​
In order to control these motors with the PCB that was in them, I had to know the schematic. After some searching I found the PCB schematic for the motherboard and traced the MOSFET driver pins out. I soldered wires to those pins and hooked them up to an Arduino running some code I found online for half-bridge motor control (high and low side MOSFET switching). This didn't work and just ended up shorting out my 36V Li-ion battery, killing the cheap BMS and blowing up a MOSFET. Oops.
​
The last thing I tried was controlling the motors with a hall-less driver made of my own MOSFETS and an Arduino. I again used some random code for driving the circuit, but apparently something was wrong because everything started on fire. The main reason for this failure was the fact that I was using small Arduino Dupont wire for a circuit drawing upwards of 3A at 36V. I quickly gave up on that after all the wires came alite and my basement filled with smoke.