When I read the title I remembered how people in the 90s at my place built their lawn mowers. It was a new thing. My father welded the frame from scrap metal with the motor from a washing machine and some tiny wheels from an old baby stroller lol. It was kind of open source, many people copied or he helped build one. Haha, served us surprisingly well for a time :)
I'm conceptually with you, just watch out because there's become a real plague of things calling themselves "open source $foo" that are not. I don't mean this submission, I mean just in general there have been quite a lot
This is a fun project to take on. Couple years ago I built an autonomous controlled chassis onto a push reel mower (removed handles of course). It’s not as safe as the typical robot mower given they use tiny blades to trim (and reel mower will take a finger) but it’s relatively low maintenance since the blades need replacing every month or so. I opted for lidar as the reviews on RTK GPS seem pretty hit or miss and didn’t want the base antenna thingy. It works well for me and the cut quality is amazing even just running once a week.
I have been dreaming of small solar robots that quietly trim the grass all day. Static blades pulled across the grass in short bursts. RC orchestration guided by security cameras.
I was hoping this was more of a hardware project as in building the physical mower from scratch. I am not quite sold on the robotic mowers but the quality and market for riding mowers is insane right now. I own two riding mowers and both are completely dead. One needs a rather expensive wiring harness so they it would stop catching fire when it runs. The other has the most common single cylinder engine that comes in all the mowers in the past like 30 years and it’s a terrible design that grenades itself 1-4 times a year. And the prices of these new and used are out of this world even compared to baseline inflation.
I decided to strip one of them and convert it to full electric using salvaged electric motors from Ryobi mowers and Amazon controllers. I have seen a few videos of this conversion and I do like the logic of having one motor for the drive wheels and one per blade rather than messing with fancy belts and pulleys and idlers and clutches. A really interesting part of this kind of build is that I can reuse Ryobi’s 40V batteries so I don’t need to design and build a custom battery + BMS + charging system. Just buy and wire enough connectors to run everything.
And that’s where it would be really cool to see a properly engineered project around doing something like that. I see a lot of potential here since you can get these motors for roughly $50 shipped on eBay and a controller would be about as much.
Using current state of tech parts, including US sourced batteries with 10 year performance guarantees, I designed a "clean sheet" electric UTV constructed with bio-composite materials that would put the John Deere Gator out of business. The NEV carve out is fascinating. I learned how to scale RC cars up so I look at this differently than Lincoln or Tesla thinking EV is a reason to stuff more and more and more things in it - simplicity is the best use case for EV.
Lawn mowing seems like such a useless thing. I mean domestic lawns themselves, especially in a crisis of biodiversity loss, are such a waste of possibility. I had to stop the video when I saw the mower was going for a patch of clovers, thus reducing plant diversity to a single boring, useless species
a square of tall grass and weeds isn't all that pretty and outright annoying if weeds are of the painful kind.
Like, yeah, there are more interesting things to do with your lawn but they all require more effort than dropping a robot charging station and letting it do its thing.
Also the clover patch is probably gonna regrow, mine do... tho I don't try to ground them to the ground
Dwarf clover is a great alternative to a lawn. I used to think lawns were useless, but if you stop and think about it for a moment, you're gonna need some clearing between the woods and your house for a firebreak and safety (snakes). Of course you're gonna want something aesthetically pleasing planted there, so that's usually grass unless you go with an alternative
I run an Open mower on my 1400 square meter lawn in the USA. AMA. (ps. If you are interested make sure to go to the discord instead of just reading the docs or GitHub pages -- that is where all the activity is!)
The page says there's no obstacle avoidance. How does it handle obstacles? Does it at least have a sensor to detect it running into an obstacle to then find some way around it? This would be the main concern for me.
Also, how long have you had it and about how much downtime have you had?
I used to research autonomous vehicles long time ago. You'd be surprised how difficult it is to do a true random walk in a real physical environment due to all the inherent physical bias and implicit steering that results from the terrain.
One of my neighbors has a fleet of solar-powered, zero-emission, self-fertilizing, biodiversity-boosting autonomous lawn-care bots. He calls them tortoises.
"Let's be honest: The current generation of robotic lawn mowers sucks. Basically all of these bots drive in a random direction until they hit the border of the lawn, rotate for a randomized duration and repeat. I think we can do better!"
The funny thing is: this actually works incredibly well. Perimeter wires are a PITA to install, but once that's done, they are a very practical and flawless method for making sure the robot does not escape into the neighbour's yard or worse. The random movement is really effective too. What exactly can a smart robot do better?
Removing the need for perimeter wires would be great, as long as it works 100% flawlessly. Obstacle detection would also be nice, so I can avoid my mower chewing up the toys my kid sometimes leaves lying around (though it is a great motivation to clean up!)
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[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 76.1 ms ] threadPlease mod your mower to automatically pick up litter along road edges, and sell it to Caltrans at dot.ca.gov
The CC-NC-SA-4.0 license isn't an Open Source Definition compliant license, since it discriminates against a field of use (commercial applications).
https://github.com/ClemensElflein/OpenMower/blob/main/LICENS... https://opensourcedefinition.org/
A reminder, open source means surrendering your monopoly over commercial exploitation:
https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/20/FOSS-is-to-surrender-your...
14. An IRC-Enabled Lawn Mower (idlerpg.net)
15. OpenMower – An Open Source Lawn Mower (github.com/clemenselflein)
We just got a Sunseeker X7 to do ~4 acres of grassed area but probably ~2 acres will be garden beds and roads etc
The hardware is there, it's all software now.
People talk about updates and the robot improved amazingly, comments like - "these scuffs are from pre-update"
These are Elon's updateable cars, they will get better with time. (Sunseeker is also camera not yet LiDAR)
Robotic mowers are better than humans, there are a few if's and buts, grass nerds compare the cuts on a grass blade on YouTube for instance.
With a robot you can set blade lengths for areas and be seasonal/weather orientated. The constant cuttings mean the nutrients get shredded back in.
The Chinese seem to be the best... but that might have been my price bracket.
Obviously since you can run them at night at 3am you quickly see other uses like security/wildlife auditing. Exciting times to live in.
Has anyone here made this project work with a mower that's easily available here?
I decided to strip one of them and convert it to full electric using salvaged electric motors from Ryobi mowers and Amazon controllers. I have seen a few videos of this conversion and I do like the logic of having one motor for the drive wheels and one per blade rather than messing with fancy belts and pulleys and idlers and clutches. A really interesting part of this kind of build is that I can reuse Ryobi’s 40V batteries so I don’t need to design and build a custom battery + BMS + charging system. Just buy and wire enough connectors to run everything.
And that’s where it would be really cool to see a properly engineered project around doing something like that. I see a lot of potential here since you can get these motors for roughly $50 shipped on eBay and a controller would be about as much.
How many such cases do we need to have to be able to put out the hypothesis that the baseline inflation figures we're being fed are wrong?
Like, yeah, there are more interesting things to do with your lawn but they all require more effort than dropping a robot charging station and letting it do its thing.
Also the clover patch is probably gonna regrow, mine do... tho I don't try to ground them to the ground
Also, how long have you had it and about how much downtime have you had?
[0]: https://valetudo.cloud/
The funny thing is: this actually works incredibly well. Perimeter wires are a PITA to install, but once that's done, they are a very practical and flawless method for making sure the robot does not escape into the neighbour's yard or worse. The random movement is really effective too. What exactly can a smart robot do better?
Removing the need for perimeter wires would be great, as long as it works 100% flawlessly. Obstacle detection would also be nice, so I can avoid my mower chewing up the toys my kid sometimes leaves lying around (though it is a great motivation to clean up!)