Fight the urge to chant the Avril Lavigne song as you cruise the streets on Pieter Thomas’s speed- and distance-tracking skateboard.

Instant approval

“That is sweet!” exclaimed Ben Nuttall when I shared this project on the Raspberry Pi Slack channel. And indeed it is — a simple idea, perfectly executed, resulting in a final product that actually managed to coax a genuine and positive response from Ben!

Prove your worth ☑

Project creator Pieter Thomas, a student at Howest Kortrijk University, needed to show off his skills by building a ‘something’ for his course. His inspiration?

I came up with this idea because I like to skate and cruise around. While I’m cruising, it would be handy to see how much distance I’ve travelled and see my speed.

So he decided to incorporate an odometer, a speedometer, and an RFID reader into a skateboard to produce this neat build.

Make and skate

While Pieter has an Arduino manage the onboard RFID reader, he’s put a Raspberry Pi 3 in charge of everything else, including the speed and distance readings taken with the help of a hall effect sensor (a transducer that uses magnetic fields to manage voltage output).

Pieter added the RFID reader to identify different users, with databases allowing for session data collection — perfect for time and speed challenges among friends!

Home-brew casing

All the electronics live in a Tupperware-like container that Pieter screwed to the bottom of the board. Holes in the deck display an LCD screen, a potentiometer, and a buzzer.

To allow speed and distance calculations, Pieter drilled a hole into one of the wheels and inserted a magnet. Once per wheel rotation, the hall effect sensor recognises the passing magnet. The build records the time taken between passes, computes the speed and distance covered, and shows them on the LCD screen.

Pieter’s Instructables project page goes into a lot more detail of how to build your own skate-o-meter. If you’ve used a Pi for your skateboarding project, make sure to let us know!

Skateboard + Pi

Other impressive Raspberry Pi–based board builds include Tim Maier’s motorised skateboard, aka the first blog post I ever wrote for Raspberry Pi, and Matt ‘The Raspberry Pi Guy’ Timmons-Brown’s 30kmph longboard, aka the project that resulted in this video of Raspberry Pi’s Director of Software Engineering: