I had a question, I keep seeing people riding these custom LED Electric longboards on the playa. They're obviously very custom I'm just curious how they went about making them. Does anyone know the person behind these? Here's a picture

This year we worked with a surfboard shop in Santa Cruz to cover the boards with semi-transparent fiberglass. Previously this shop had made real surfboards with LEDs in them. We also covered the board surface with crushed glass to provide better grip. One problem that the glass also did a wonderful job of gripping playa dust as well, so we had to frequently and vigorously sweep them so that you could see the LEDs. The fiberglass does a great job of spreading the load so that you don't crush the LEDs when you stand on them.spacetime wrote:What transparent and durable material do you cover the LED strips with, and how do you secure it to the surfboards?
Hey, thanks for that info.Jclarkcom wrote:This year we worked with a surfboard shop in Santa Cruz to cover the boards with semi-transparent fiberglass. Previously this shop had made real surfboards with LEDs in them. We also covered the board surface with crushed glass to provide better grip. One problem that the glass also did a wonderful job of gripping playa dust as well, so we had to frequently and vigorously sweep them so that you could see the LEDs. The fiberglass does a great job of spreading the load so that you don't crush the LEDs when you stand on them.spacetime wrote:What transparent and durable material do you cover the LED strips with, and how do you secure it to the surfboards?
Sorry to hear about that. People definitely shouldn't be going fast, especially on crowded street. I'm always careful about this, but will have a word with others.maladroit wrote:DISTRIKT had a bunch of them. I saw a young man get nearly shouted off one of the surfboards for zooming too fast down the street, what seemed like a 12 foot tall angry man was screaming at him "GET THE FUCK BACK HERE AND LISTEN TO ME YOU CAN'T GO THAT FAST" etc. Then a much more low-key woman gave an equally devastating "we're all friends here, don't get carried away by music and go too fast honey" speech.
Sorry, I don't know the details on the real surfboards, I think they only made 1 and not sure how the waterproofed it. Seems like it would be pretty cool at night.spacetime wrote:Hey, thanks for that info.Jclarkcom wrote:This year we worked with a surfboard shop in Santa Cruz to cover the boards with semi-transparent fiberglass. Previously this shop had made real surfboards with LEDs in them. We also covered the board surface with crushed glass to provide better grip. One problem that the glass also did a wonderful job of gripping playa dust as well, so we had to frequently and vigorously sweep them so that you could see the LEDs. The fiberglass does a great job of spreading the load so that you don't crush the LEDs when you stand on them.spacetime wrote:What transparent and durable material do you cover the LED strips with, and how do you secure it to the surfboards?
That's interesting. For real surfboards with LEDs embedded in them, where and how do they package rechargeable (?) batteries, control switches and microcontrollers for the waves?
Interesting stuff. Sound like some pretty serious custom jobs.Jclarkcom wrote: We use a lot of parts from off the shelf electric skateboards from China, but there is a bit of work on speed, braking, battery monitoring, etc. Battery estimation turns out to be a pretty hard problem, we are using some chips designed for laptops to do this that use a machine learning process to try to estimate battery availability. If your battery runs out unexpectedly you can get thrown off fairly violently and we've had some injuries from this.
Bad news, they aren't allowed any more. Too big, too fast, too able-to-keep-going-forever-if-the-rider-falls-off.
I linked the reddit post, the official burning man page, and the borg planning slide deck. Read whichever one(s) you want. If you're upset about the forum inlining reddit posts and not inlining burningman.org pages, you need to take that up with the forum admins.
Perhaps care more about reading comprehension? I didn't say anything about what reddit does or doesn't do. I referred to this forum's feature for inlining content from reddit, which you interpreted as me quoting a post on reddit when I did not.
"Any powered vehicle not on the “Allowed PTVs” list (other than the vehicle you drive to the event) may not be brought to Black Rock City."