This Handy Device Tells You How Much Battery Power Your Hoverboard Is Consuming

There is a good chance that your car tells you what your current fuel economy is, in addition to how much fuel you have left. That’s very useful for two reasons: it lets you adjust your driving to improve fuel economy and it gives you the ability to estimate your remaining range. Unfortunately, those features are lacking on many electric vehicles, such as hoverboards and some electric bikes. They might give you a vague idea of how much battery capacity is remaining, but they don’t tell you how much power you’re currently using. That’s why Niklas Roy built this handy Hoverboard Power Monitor.

Even though it may not be obvious, your hoverboard consumes a variable amount of power. If you’re moving quickly, it will draw more current. Because hoverboards are self-balancing, even standing still requires power and that consumption is based on how much correcting the board has to perform. Roy’s Hoverboard Power Monitor provide real-time data on how much power is being consumed at any given time, as well as long term data like averages and peak consumption. The really neat part is that Roy has programmed a timing-correct visualizer for the data. That visualizer can be overlaid on video of the hoverboard in use, which makes it easy to see how different motions affect power consumption.

Hoverboards are built by a variety of manufacturers and it is likely that many of them have control boards that collect this data internally. But trying to access that data, even if it is present, would be a major undertaking. Instead, Roy’s device connects inline between the hoverboard’s battery and the rest of the electronics. The monitor is able to measure amperes and voltage, and uses those numbers to calculate power consumption in watts. It’s built around an Arduino Nano board and the collected data is stored on an SD card. The data is also shown on a small 1.8” TFT LCD screen in the device’s enclosure. A real-time clock keeps track of the time for the visualizer program, which was coded in Processing. Power for the device is pulled from the hoverboard’s batteries. The enclosure was built from PVC foam panels that were zip-tied together. If you’d like to build your own Hoverboard Power Monitor, Roy has provided the design files and code on his GitHub page.