We millennials had a few character archetypes we could choose to aspire to in high school, with sk8er boi being among the most coveted. After all, who wouldn’t want 2002 Avril Lavigne to fall in love with them? But despite what Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater led us to believe, skateboarding is actually really difficult. Many of us set our sights modestly on the humble kickflip and couldn’t even pull that off. But technology is supposed to be the great equalizer and so Allen Pan decided to try to use that to become the sk8er boi he always wanted to be.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 just released and the nostalgia factor is huge for those of us who spent countless teenage years grinding the rails of that franchise. To help promote the game, Activision reached out to Pan and asked him to build something related to skateboarding. He saw that as his opportunity to finally pull off a kickflip — or even just a basic ollie.
His initial approach was to turn a skateboard into an insanely powerful drone. It had around 60 pounds of thrust and that definitely isn’t enough to lift a full-grown man, but Pan figured the droneboard could do some sick maneuvers underneath his feet when he jumped into the air. He even turned to Jake Laser for assistance, as that dude has almost as much experience with drones as he does with the free weights at the gym.
Unfortunately, the droneboard idea was unsound. There are several reasons why it didn’t work, but the biggest issue was that it couldn’t react fast enough to both overcome the force of Pan jumping and flip itself around during the short amount of time Pan was in the air.
But Pan’s next idea was more promising. He mounted CO2 pressure-actuated pistons to the bottom of a skateboard deck that provide immediate upward force when activated. The rider can trigger them by releasing a button on a PlayStation controller connected to an ESP32 development board on the skateboard, which opens the solenoid valves between the CO2 cartridges and the pistons. When both fire at the same time, the skateboard does an ollie. When one fires, the skateboard does a kickflip.
However, pulling that off still requires precise timing and so Pan headed to a local skatepark to find someone more experienced. There, he just happened to stumble across skateboarding legend and guy you didn’t realize was still alive, Bam Margera. The man has had a rough couple of decades, but he still has skill with a skateboard. That skill helped him pull off a kickflip with Pan’s board.
With the knowledge that the feat was possible, Pan gave it a try himself. And succeeded! Or mostly succeeded. He didn’t land it, but we say it still counts and now Pan is a certified sk8er boi. We expect that Avril Lavigne will be getting in touch with him very soon.