There has been a long-time mystery for a lot of people why their Onewheel board’s nosedive, BadgerWheel designed to take on this challenge and launched the BadgerSense and the BadgerSight HUD for some extra flair. So what is the BadgerSense,
The BadgerSense is, is a visual indication of the current power consumption of your Onewheel. By looking at the power gauge or HUD you get your speed, and available power limit to try and help you avoid overpowering the board, resulting in a nosedive.
Currently, it’s only available for XR, but a version for Pint and GT is coming. The BadgerSense is sold by BadgerWheel and does cost $400 at retail price.
The BadgerSense uses a led stripe as both a power gauge and speedometer, a really clever design. The bars and colors of the LEDs let you know much power the motor has left before a nosedive will happen. Are you running on the green side you are safe, it turns red when more than 80% of the available power is used.
On the led strip the white LED shows your current speed in increments of 1mph. The maximum visual speed is therefore 30mph as the stip got 30 LEDs. At low speeds where speed and power are not really needed it instead shows the remaining battery life. This works even with battery upgrades.
How to install the BadgerSense
Installing the BadgerSense is not for everyone, you need to open the board and install taps into both the battery and motor leads. Still, this is a fairly simple installation and could be considered a non-invasive installation.
The installation is in short to install 3 posi-taps, one on the motor wire and two on the battery leads to the controller, both red and black.
For detailed instructions head over to BadgerWheels.
How does the BadgerSens work
I do respect BadgerWheel as a company too much to actually disclose how this work, they are a great company that has provided a lot of things to the market. Still making what they have done with the BadgerSense, packing it into a small control unit that’s waterproof with a light indicator, and also communicating to a HUD (BadgerSight) is awesome.
For anyone with enough knowledge about motors and batteries, I think replicating this modification would be possible. I recommend everyone support the third-party community out there.
The clues I can give are, to take look at where they are vamping into the board to get information. I would think that they need to do some recording to create and use a lookup table for some of the information.
Is the BadgerSense worth it?
It really comes down to what you are after. For me, no it’s not worth it on a stock Onewheel Pint, adding the $400 to the stock price is a big bump in price. For a full-specced XR or GT, yes then it could be.
We all ride our boards differently and when it comes to the end of the day, what do you want to do in your spare time. Many hobbies do cost a lot, and limited production is not cheap.
Interested in the BadgerSense, get it from BadgerWheels official homepage.
BadgerWheel is the company behind some other awesome accessories like the bearing protection for your board to help make the board more water-resistant.
Image source: BadgerWheel
