Do you remember the good old times, when the kids were out on the streets terrorizing the town with their skateboards? It seems they all have swapped their boards with couches and video consoles, skating virtually now. Sure, this is cool, but we want the kids back on the streets. So what about skating on a real board while listening to cool tunes and getting points for your kickflip or 360? We will pimp your deck with an N900, so you can enjoy the advantages of modern skating video games in your favourite halfpipe.

So how will it work? Of course, it’s a bit scary to have such a wonderful device like the N900 being mounted directly on the rough back of a skateboard. The stuntman for our N900 will be a brave micro-controller which is glued to the bottom of our shiny board. It’s connected to sensors observing the moves and transmits them via Bluetooth to the N900, which is safe and warm in the skater’s pocket.

Graphical chart how the components communicate

The idea is to mount two securely cased micro-controller to the bottom of the board under each trucks. A three-axis accelerometer, a gyroscope, and a Bluetooth module are wired to the micro-controller. The data produced by the sensors will be transmitted to the N900 via Bluetooth. The raw data are then interpreted by a software running on the Maemo device. The program has stored a set of known trick patterns and compares them with the incoming sensor data. When it recognizes a trick it will play a bunch of samples, like “Bump Kickflip; 50 points; Awesome!”.

The software will be able to communicate via XMPP to other devices and share high-scores and provide competitions. We plan to implement the XMPP communication with Telepathy, so available Jabber or GTalk accounts can be used. For the same reason we will implement Mircofeed for Twitter and Facebook.
We will use standard sensors and parts and will document everything well, so any interested skater or hacker can built his own pimped skateboard and enjoy the competition.