The Onewheel GTXS (Half scale GTS)
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Next challenge was making the controller lid. I wasn't sure if I wanted to resin print it, resin cast it or pay to have it CNC'd out of polycarbonate. Since the former is easiest and the latter the hardest and more expensive I decided to give it a shot. My curing station looks like I'm up to some evil shenanigans so enjoy a picture of that.
I won't bore you with the early prototypes and failures with me snapping one in half because I overcooked it with the print settings. Instead here's pretty happy final versions
Bottom one is the new one. Seems counter intuitive at first but printing with all the nasty support on the flat nice side allows you to easily sand down the surface and get a suuuuuper smooth finish. 1000 grit final and a light buff with some clear coat made it pop.I still need to work on the gaskets and I had a dilema. Do the stock black one that's kinda boring and keep it vanilla ooooor use a much more thematically coloured TFL gasket. I put a poll out on Insta and the results spoke for themselves.
So guess I'll be making go faster blue gaskets when I get the material and dye.
Meanwhile a little care package came in the post. Thanks to the legend himself Radim Klaska for sending me a GT controller, BMS and a pint controller for some future devious plans. Using them side by side with the GTXS you can kinda see how similar I managed to get them.
I'll be pulling it apart to reverse engineer a custom controller and get a schematic out of it for some experiments I have planned. However here it serves well to demonstrate scale 😊Back to the main goal again. The board won't do much if I don't get a charger made for it so with callipers at the ready I managed to replicate a brick and cram some magic smoke inside. I'm using a USB PD module to take in power and request 20v. Then a CC-CV boost converter to take the 20v and send a set current into the board until it gets near 29.4v where it'll hold that voltage to top off the cells. Basically how any normal lithium charger works that's not complete trash.
For the charge port itself I'm using some magnetic pogo pin connectors. They work really well and despite being 6mm in diameter this one can do 2amps. Added bonus is they're super satisfying to snap in. It's like magsafe for Onewheels (for ants)
Will come back to this when I resin print the final parts for the plug and charge brick. In the meantime I needed to figure out the harness. I wanted it to be orange like the GTS but finding multicore cable with 2x14awg + 3x24awg wire inside less than 8mm in diameter was a bit of a stretch so I came up with a solution.
Use a mould to encase the wires taught and in position then pour a flexible silicone over. Once cured demould and use heat shrink to get a uniformly round and flexible cable. Heat shrink alone will be weird and kinky. as it conforms to the wires inside and be less durable. I did a test piece first with some offcuts and despite being very messy it worked!
You can also see I made my own glands. The existing ones on the market just didn't scale right and the fitment was poor so a bit of CAD resulted in some functional yet scale looking glands.In an older prototype the cable fits nice and snug. Minor kinks where some silicone hadn't set right or the wiring wasn't taught but overall looks great!
With that being a success it was time to crack on with the final one. I did have to crimp some insanely small connectors for the headlight and battery harness wires. Did these with some tweezers. They are tiny! Here's one under the scope.
I changed the mould a little this time and taught the cables before putting in which helped a lot although made slotting them in a faff. But it all went in well and cast really nicely.
I ran out of time last night to put the headers and connectors on controller side but I'll hopefully do that tonight and share the results of the board running off it's own power 🥰Until then enjoy this render and little pic I took for my application to this years OpenSauce.
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@lia You are a perfectionist! I can't believe the attention to the smallest detail!
Totally insane! -
@lemur It's really hard not to 😅 Like I know inside some of the details like the "Destroy Boredom" on the inside of the bumper or the little FM branding on the controller will never be seen by most but it feels good to add it ^-^ Little easter eggs I guess.
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Woke up to some freshly printed parts. One in particular this fender delete. Might possibly be one of the largest prints on the resin machine I've done yet.
After post processing that a little I got the harness headers controller side fit and tested.
Lights in the front and rear all sink up so that's a bonus. No pic of the lights since I was holding wires together but trust me it looked fab. I just need to attach the battery connector now but I forgot I never painted the female end of the xt30. Trouble is painting these is really tedious. Too much and you ruin the finer details. Too little and you see the yellow.
I then remembered you can dye some plastics and would you know it these xt30's are made of nylon (or something very similar) which takes dye easy. A bowl of boiling water, some synthetic dye and about 10 minutes of stirring got me some really nice orange connectors!
Unlike paint it doesn't scratch off as easy which is a bonus and no more masking the tiny metal bits!
I ran out of time today to fit them so instead I'll leave you with some more cool pics of the XS and prototype GTXS together 🥰
GTXS sporting the new high kick rear pad and the fender delete now.
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It was finally time to add the XT30 😊 I've been putting this off for a veeeeeeeery long time.
And thankfully without issue (other than be knocking the headlight connector off) it woooooooooooorked!
SHE LIIIIIVES!!!! 🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰
(apologies for the vertical video but sorta filmed it for Insta)I'm so happy it booted up fine. Batteries are a little lower than I thought so after a brief hiatus I'll rig up the charger and get it back to nominal. Unlike the XS I will be able to actually see the battery health too 😅
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Hiatus over but I'm still a bit slow atm. Health thingy (I'm okay don't worry just recovering still)
Been struggling to figure out a way to stop battery voltage being present at the charge port. A diode is the obvious answer but it introduces a voltage drop which when current is passed will heat up heaps. I could use a fet instead but as the voltage is always present one side I can't easily make a small circuit to block the voltage and turn on when present in the reverse. Giving up I just added an inline smd 3a fuse so if something does go wrong it blows without stopping the board working. That leaves the charge protector to do the heavy lifting keeping the 29.4v from escaping.
If anyone's got any better idea's I'm all ears :3Before trying with a battery I checked if the board could power on and validate the power being received. Sure enough it was happy ^-^
With all my fingers and toes crossed I plugged in the battery and connected it all up. Surprisingly without any drama it worked and I was able to bring the battery back up to something sensible.
So now came the fun bit. Does it go beep beep zoom zoom?
And now with the footpads set to ghost?
Lil demon child. It's after my ankles for sure! However it's got no grip at all with that PLA tire so it's about time I got that sorted. With a 0.2mm nozzle and 0.06mm layer height I have begun printing the halves of the master tire to make a silicone mould with. It's gonna take a while though at this resolution... like... nearly 40 hours per side and that's not including the outer shell for the moulds which will at least be printed in a much lower resolution.
One side is done but still waiting on t'other. Enjoy a glam shot of it before post processing 😊
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@lia awesome as usual...
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@Lia I just caught FM's short on your visit, way to go!!! It looks like you had a great time, and I love how much they loved your work.
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@lia It still blows me away with all the detail and everything is accurate to scale, if i never knew in advance it's half scale , I would swear it's full scale.
Truly beautiful work! -
Thanks guys! They really loved this one. Alec from FM came to find us at Opensauce 2025 and we arranged another visit to HQ. Also swung by TFL the day after ^-^
Kinda forgot to share the progress here. Does anyone want me to do a condensed update from the last update to now or nah?
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@lia I would love a short one, and maybe a few still pictures of the final product. The rails look so good, how did you do it? Is it paint, decal, wrap, ...? Did FM say anything about it being powered by VESC, or was everyone happy just to sweep that under the rug and enjoy your engineering skills?
