At the end of the Covid-semester, a friend and I decided we needed a project to bring some life to our studies. As an electric engineer and mechanical engineer, we came together to create an electric go-kart (spongebob inspired). In the spongebob show, the characters drive around the streets in boats, and we wanted our own. The plan was to build our own boat, and add electric hub motors to the back two wheels, and a castor wheel on the front.
A big thanks to our landlords at the time who were MIT alumni and let us take over the entire basement for the project as well as use any power tools in the vicinity. The electric wheels were taken from a broken hoverboard someone was selling online. This board, like most broken electric vehicles, only had battery issues. This allowed us to reconfigure the hub motors for ourselves. We bought an all-purpose motor controller online. With this along with 36V of acid batteries, we were able to power the motors for hour-long drives.
We even gave ourselves directional control! By assembling eight light switches that could be flipped simultaneously, we flipped the directions of the wires. The boat itself was made from large plywood sheets. Most of the time was devoted to cutting, nailing, screwing, and painting the wood. At the end of the week, we came away with an electric go-kart with directional control that we used to drive around the streets!