I am loving the electric longboard. I can ride over 10 miles on a single charge at 25 mph, and I feel like I can go anywhere.
So naturally, I am quite unhappy when it doesn't work.
A month ago, I was riding and managed to drop the controller I was using and it stopped working. Unfortunately, no controller = no skateboard. Oh yes, it still rolls like a skateboard. But I put a large battery on it so that I could be lazy, not so that I could push an extra 10 pounds around.
After trying another remote and having it decide to quit working, I resolved to take matters into my own hand. Hence, the Feather Remote. The name is actually from the Adafruit Feather boards, which I used to create the prototype, and whose schematic I followed to implement the board design. I removed a few pieces, and added the following: pads to solder an HM-10 bluetooth module, an fram module for memory, a power switch, an easy access port to program the IC, and I reordered the pins to stack an oled screen directly on top.
The HM-10 module is fantastic. Unlike other remotes I've used where you sit and wait for it to pair with the receiver, the HM-10 module connects almost instantly with its partner in the board, which also gives me confidence that if I lose connection for a second, for any reason, I don't have to worry about not being able to reconnect.
If you'd like to take a look at the product, everything is contained on a github repository. The remote works well, but I didn't finish designing a case to hold it.