Group strives to create an electric longboard for their senior project

Surrounded by sharp tools and blue walls, senior David Doluca sat in the engineering room, his head buried in his hands and his eyes sore and red from hours of staring at the computer screen. He leaned back in his chair to take a quick break, intently thinking of solutions to problems that seemed impossible to figure out.

Since September, students in the Engineering Design and Development (EDD) class, consisting only of experienced seniors who have taken at least two prerequisite years of engineering courses, have been working on their senior projects. Teacher Audrey Warmouth gave the seniors the opportunity to culminate their years of knowledge into a single project that emphasizes good design, functionality and ingenuity.

While other groups in the class are focusing their efforts on building foldable bicycles or solar panel cleaners, Doluca, along with seniors Nicole Lin, Steve Lai and Spencer Robinson, is striving to design and produce an electric longboard that is effective in snowy and icy conditions.

“The idea is to appeal to college students who aren’t able to use their skateboard during the winter months,” said Doluca. “We came up with the idea as a solution to our own problems.”

The longboard’s design requires fields of knowledge that none of the team members are well acquainted with, thus requiring extensive research on waterproofing of electronics, motor controller design and traction functions in snow and ice. As of now, the team is still in its research phase but does have a general form factor and design established.

“It will probably look like a normal electric skateboard except the wheels with be interchangeable so you’ll be able to take out the wheels and put in different ones based on weather conditions,” Robinson said.

For Doluca, not all the knowledge used to build his project comes from his four years in the engineering program. His extensive background as a member of the M-SET FRC Robotics team has vastly contributed to his project.

“From robotics, we’ve gained experience of where to buy quality parts from online sources and how to budget our money well,” Doluca said. “It's also given us some industry contacts who could help as consultants or manufacturers. People who are not in robotics may have to start from scratch in this regard.”

In addition, robotics teaches its members about critical thinking, parts manufacturing and 3-D modeling, all integral supplements to his project.

“The engineering classes teach 3-D modeling, but what we do in robotics is far more advanced, so it helps with this project specifically,” Doluca said.

Although the product is still within its first stages of inception, the team hopes that it will have a major impact on the longboarding industry.

“I do think that we are going to get a working final product in the end,” Robinson said. “Whether or not it’s cost efficient or actually that much better than the average skateboard remains to be seen.”