> 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 recently (a few weeks ago) bought one. While researching on the available options (which seemed relevant to me), actually almost none of the robots work this way. Most of them systematically go through the lawn. I think from those that I checked, only the Worx Landroid does it randomly.
I was searching for some model which works without wires, because I was too lazy to set this up. Basically, in general, I wanted sth which required as little effort as possible.
I decided for eufy E15, which uses camera (no GPS, no wires, no lidar, nothing else really). And it just seems to work. It creates a map first, and then systematically goes over the lawn. I didn't really need to do anything.
(I'm not affiliated with eufy in any way. I'm just quite happy with it so far.)
That said, obviously, having an open source variant of such a robot would be even nicer (if it works)! So I'm quite happy to see such a project.
This robot here uses GPS, as far as I can see, as the sole technique for navigation and localization. From reports that I have read, GPS mostly works fine, except for some cases where it does not (where GPS coverage is not great). Camera on the other side always works (during daytime). Maybe this could be added to this project? Of course, using the camera is probably quite a bit more complicated, and more prone to errors, but overall might be more robust and reliable.
I have a Husqvarna and wouldn't be happier. It also randomly mows the lawn. I haven't paid a landscaper service forb3 years now. The only yard work I would need to care for are edge and bush trim. I have mostly flat yard with the size of 5000 sqft.
I think GPS is essential. Tie it to a location - if stolen, it won't operate.
Then a way to text you if it is moved outside the designated area. Telling you where it is.
At that point, I suppose it would still be worth stealing just for the battery? A hard problem to solve.
The problem with gps is it doesn't work (reliably) under trees which many lawns have. Since trees are common in yards they need something else anyway and at that point you can get rid of the gps
In my case, my lawn isn't easily accessible and also not visible from the street (because the house and garage is between the street and the garden), and I trust my neighbors. So, I think (I hope) this isn't so much an issue for my case.
I think the eufy has also an optional GPS module just for this purpose, to better track it. I don't think this GPS module has any other purpose (e.g. it would not be used for navigation). But I didn't really checked the details on this.
I have seen this a few times for such robots, that you can buy an optional GPS module for tracking.
Maybe instead of GPS or camera, it could have a local positioning system instead. 3 small, solar powered beacons can be installed around the yard to be mowed.
I have seen such variants as well, where you actually need to install some antennas (RTK antennas?).
But that was already too much effort for me, so that's why I chose the eufy. Also, from reports that I have read, it doesn't necessarily work better with antennas. Actually, from reports that I have read, robots with camera-only had the least amount of reports where navigation was not properly working. At least that was my impression.
The Mowgli project is reusing the mainboard of the original lawnmower (might be enhanced with a RPi though). It's not currently as well-baked (or at least, well-trodden) as the default OpenMower approach which does indeed involve ripping out the mainboard and replacing it.
"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!)
I have a Mammotion Yuba and trust me, the grass looks awesome as a grid or in lines. It can even do logos. So far nicer looking grass and much faster then random.
It looks like obstacle avoidance is the key thing remaining in the software todos. For positioning it seems you get your pick of RTK GPS sensors, so it'd be interesting to still support guide wires for "escape protection".
Regardless of how good the perimeter wire bots are, it's also not true that the more advanced generation "sucks." I have one and it works perfectly fine (Mammotion Luba 2). The hardware is great, positioning is great; there is always stuff to nitpick on the software side but at the end of the day that's great as well.
I didn't say "just let it grow over" though. Turn it into natural landscape except the part you need for recreation. In many places people almost never play or sit in their front yard, for example. If you make that a natural landscape you might have to mow it once or less per year depending on what you actually plant.
It's a nice thought but the reality is that you'll be killing animals no matter what. I have a 48" riding mower and live in a rural area. At first I was really worried about all the field mice, voles, frogs, etc., that I saw running away from the mower. After a while, I realized that no matter how hard I tried, a certain number of them were just going to die. I tend to let my lawn grow fairly tall before cutting, and it's a mix of grasses, clovers, wildflowers and other plants that just grow naturally around here. The downside is that a lot of small animals live in it. I only remember running over one bunny so far, but who knows how many I might not have seen.
At least it's not fawns. Baby deer seem to be a magnet for combines harvesting corn.
Anything having lots of rpm ain't silent. Especially not at night.
So they surely ain't as loud as a combustion lawn mower and are pretty silent in comparison, so maybe you won't notice them in the city with its background noise. But in rural areas I perceive them as noisy even on daylight with normal noise level. And I never saw anyone using them at night - for a reason.
And as for gp .. he is already shadowbanned and you likely cannot see his answer (I have showdead=true). He reacted poorly I think.
Yeah, in that case, this sounds like a horrific idea.
I could hear a neighbours smoke alarm beeping periodically due to low battery the other night and went around to replace the battery for them the next day.
Also, I wasn't aware of the showdead setting (and had no idea about the answer that had been hidden), thanks for the tip.
Your brain will completely tune the beeping sound out after a certain point, if it's a thing you notice at all. Similar reason to reversing truck beepers being replaced with ones that produce white (or other coloured) noise, so you don't lose your ability to hear where they are.
Can only disagree there (I built an OpenMower based on a SA650B), in a rural area, also cannot hear it from about 10m away, even at night.
Though I don't run it at night except when it is just finishing up from the afternoon
Either there is a new generation of ultra silent mowers, or we have vastly different hearing levels.
Edit: but I only know of mowers noise level from what I experience walking around, I don't own one, nor did I research that model number. Maybe I will.
Electric motors can run at quite high rpms with lower decibels. Sure not silent but the origin is low enough that at a distance say 25 feet it’s almost silent.
True, but remember what’s quiet to a human may be quite different to what’s quiet to a hedgehog. When reading about these things it’s surprising how often things that we might not consider - like how vibrations travel though the ground - can confuse wildlife in ways that we might not expect when viewed through an anthropomorphic lens.
I have an electric (though not robotic) lawn mower, and it turns out that it's not much quieter than a gas powered one. No engine noise obviously, but the blades spinning and hitting grass still makes a lot of noise (and indeed in my case it turned out to be the vast majority of the noise). So it wouldn't be a very good idea to run your robot lawn mower at night.
It probably depends on model, but mine is dead silent (Mammotion Luba 2). However the reason I avoid running it at night is it has a fairly bright headlight, and I worry it might create shadows/light effects in my neighbors house and I know they have little kids.
I think the concern is animals that hide or sit still when threatened more so than it chasing down a rabbit :p
Also, eventually animals would get used to the noise until they get hurt.
The wildlife (like hedgehogs) will feel very audited when they get sliced up by a razorblade, run over, and can barely drag themselves off your lawn to bleed out throughout hours of pain. If they don't bleed out, they often end up mutilated, unable to properly eat, walk, etc.
Nice wildlife auditing. Hedgehogs are endangered in lots of areas of the world. Run your robot lawnmower during the day.
If you don't like that mental image, you should feel for the people working at hedgehog rescues
They're certainly not endangered. They were "Least Concern" up until the last few years but have been reclassified as "Near Threatened" due to greenfield sites turned over to land development fragmenting their habitats. The most likely place a person will see them in 2025 is flattened on a road.
Domestic gardens make up an almost insignificant percentage of their natural habitat in any case, and any sort of HOA or Estate Management scenario would likely make it a violation to rewild a garden sufficient to create an amenable hedgehog habitat.
In short, its the responsibility of land utilised for agriculture - and this is recognised by measures around Europe such as the Eco-Scheme and ACRES (Agri-Climate Rural Environment Scheme) which indirectly support the re-establishment of hedgehog populations.
No, but they curl up into a ball to protect themselves. Since they're spiky, that seems to work reasonably well against animals. Less so against blades.
The price still needs to come down for what is effectively a slightly more rugged robot vaccuum. I could buy a used car for that, and have enough left over to make it run reliably.
The quality of cheaper models is not great. I bought two from Einhell (power tool brand like DeWalt in Europe) and they both had to be returned due to motor failures. A replacement motor was €150 - for a €400 robot without battery (it uses their 18V tool batteries which is what appealed to me - easy replacement).
The thing is, they are more than a robot vacuum. They need to be able to:
- deal with rougher, bumpier terrain (friction!)
- do so uphill through uncut grass
- not stall the mowing motor with high grass
- cover a larger area
- be waterproof against rain
All of these points need a lot more power individually, and especially so when taken together (and carrying the weight increase of all those upgrades). It seems reasonable they'd cost at least twice as much for "similar" feature/budget levels. And I think that's pretty much what we're seeing.
My father just picked up a Husqvarna 430x to do his yard, and it's a pretty great piece of equipment. It runs basically around the clock and handles his acre on a hillside with relative ease... It finds a couple of the garden beds a bit tricky to navigate, but that'll be a software issue that likely improves as time goes on.
I’ve been watching the “Lymow One” with great interest because it appears a lot more rugged and it uses actual mower-style blades rather than the rotating-disc-and-razors model. Also claims to be able to take care of 1.7 acres, which is about spot on what I need.
It’s still pretty new though, and it's a kickstarter from a new company so not much trust yet.
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.
I would love to hear more about this if you have information online anywhere.
I gave up on having an electric mower any time soon since I have a riding mower and a garden tractor that simply won't die. I really don't want to buy something new if I can keep repairing old stuff, no matter how annoying it gets.
However, I am interested in building an electric UTV in large part because it would be quieter than my Honda Foreman.
From what I gather you can measure inflation many different ways. It’s not an absolute value but more of an average of prices on some number of goods. Kind of like how there are many index funds having different mixes of securities.
This is as much a complaint about high prices as the fact that Briggs & Stratton keeps making and selling an engine with an absolutely awful design.
If you want the boring details: it is a single cylinder 4 stroke motor. The first issue is that while it is dead simple, it does not have a modern way to control the RPM. These motors are meant to run at roughly 3600 RPM but at full throttle (how they are meant to be operated once in use) they will easily exceed that especially with no load such as in neutral. So they have a mechanical governor, which is also combined with an oil slinger (exactly what it sounds like: it is just a thing that slings oil all over the place hoping to get it onto the parts that need it). This contraption looks like this: https://www.lawnmowerpros.com/prodimages/691968.jpg. It is not very sturdy and is not very well mounted. It tends to break or even jam the gears between the crankshaft and the camshaft. This is bad because you don’t want loose pieces flying inside the bottom end of the motor.
In addition these motors have puny starters, so they have what’s called a compression release, which is a weight and a spring on the cam shaft. You can see it right by the gear here: https://www.briggsbits.co.uk/acatalog/84005207.3.jpeg
The idea is that at low RPM such as while you start the engine, the tiny spring will hold the weight to the shaft and the bump on it will keep the exhaust valve slightly open. This will mean you don’t get normal combustion but also it will be a lot easier to turn the engine over which is important for the puny starter. At higher RPM the weight will fly out and the other side with the bump will retract causing the exhaust valve to close fully when necessary.
The issue with this design is that the spring as you can see is tiny and thin and the weight is also pretty flimsy. They tend to break off and then you have a chunk of metal again.
Speaking of the camshaft, notice that the cam lobes are pressed onto the camshaft, not cut out of a single piece of steel. This is cheap but tends to be very sloppy. These motors don’t run very well.
And lastly, while these motors have a (tiny) oil pump and it is properly driven by the camshaft, the part that drives the oil pump is actually a separate piece of shaft that just slots into the main shaft of the camshaft. You can see it here as the short shaft with two flat parts on either end: https://www.lsengineers.co.uk/media/catalog/product/cache/21...
This means the camshaft isn’t even straight necessarily but is gear driven which requires more precision than chain, not less.
This is before we get into just basics like the fact that none of them have proper head/cylinder mating surfaces so they blow head gaskets like crazy, or their very loose rockers that go out of spec all the time causing it to run very poorly and needing constant adjustment. This is the same exact engine in every smaller riding mower on the market today. If you don’t get this one, you will get a much worse Kohler equivalent.
An equivalent Honda engine I could swap into my mower would cost me $2,000 for a refurb. Harbor Freight used to sell a motor for this for $800 but discontented it a few years ago. Basically, the entire market segment is shit. Greenworks and Ryobi have the electric mowers for about $5,000 that don’t seem to have these issues but batteries don’t have nearly the energy density than the two gallon of gas which is what it takes to run a normal mower for an hour.
Is this a newer design? Asking because I have a 40-year-old Murray garden tractor with an 18hp 2-cylinder Briggs 4-stroke and while it's harder to start in winter now (snowblower duty), it doesn't show any sign of dying soon.
This is the Intek single cylinder 500cc that is rated for 16-18hp depending on who you get it from (though internally they are all the same). I do think it is newer but not that new. Their V twins are apparently a bit more bulletproof though I haven’t taken mine apart to check. That’s the one that catches fire now due to bad wiring.
Yes I am in the US but in so far as inflation is an overall increase in cost of goods and services, the tariffs are one contributing factor to it. How much of a factor is probably hard to tell but my gut feeling says in this case it is probably significant.
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 :)
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.
Would you mind sharing any pictures or video about the mower? I converted my push reel to electric without a kit, and have been considering putting separate high torque, low speed motors for drive wheel control to start moving towards autonomous cutting. Would be great to see your experience!
I made it for my country home and won’t be there for a bit but maybe one day I’ll document it. But the parts store I used closed down, Open Builds Part Store. It’s nothing proprietary to them, I just got all the v slot aluminum frame and connectors there to build the chassis. Then I got hub motor wheels on Amazon or Aliexpress and batteries too. Most small components I get on Amazon, motor controller. I went with off-road air filled tires. And I wrote all then logic into an arduino mega. Oh and I used an upside down rubber made container as the case for electronics. Everything is mounted to the bottom of the lid and the box part is functionally the lid that I remove to gain access. It as built in snap locks and I used weather stripping to make the seal tight.
You just have to figure out how to mount to the lawn mower part of your choice, after than it’s the same as building any vehicle.
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 yardforce500 is hard to find in the USA, but it's extremely cheap in Europe. I found a great deal and paid $208 for the mower and $135 for a package forwarder to ship it from Germany. I have a complete spreadsheet of my expenses here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BV8VCtqTer8iodXvyRd1...
It's hard to put a specific number on it, since it's been progressively improving the whole time I had it. I bought it in the fall of 2023, and got it "running" then, but it was not actually doing any useful work. Summer of 2024 it was doing useful work but required constant hand holding and a series of hardware and software upgrades to get it more stable. This year it is actually doing the majority of the mowing. It still requires frequent rescue but it's a lot less work than actually mowing the lawn myself.
However my lawn is probably the most difficult lawn of any openmower user. I'm in Vermont, so I have very steep terrain, a bumpy yard, poor GPS reception, very wet weather, and also my lawn is very large and complex shaped. For a simple use case it would be working great a long time ago. I also chose to do a "Mowgli" build which is based on more reverse engineering, which added complexity and unreliability (but saved some money).
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?
It does not have obstacle avoidance, the best it has is recognizing it keeps getting stuck and skipping the next goal until it finds a goal it can reach. This can often look like obstacle avoidance since the next goal might be in a slightly different direction and so it will be able to continue. This is aided by a new feature that I added which will make the mower back up first when it gets stuck before continuing.
However, I should note that it's a hackable ROS system, so people have added obstacle detection with various sensors on their mowers. There is just not official support or a standard way to do it.
I've mowed with it this summer and last summer, and there hasn't been downtime at much as repeatedly getting stuck and requiring me to bring it back to the dock (although less and less). But my lawn is probably the hardest lawn any Openmower mows, as I mentioned in a cousin comment.
Agreed, the Mammotion hardware is amazing - the app is horrible. An open API would solve this as well, but there's little chance with the Chinese owners.
The hardware+software used to both be under that same non commercial cc license, but there was recently a relicense of the software to GPL3. I think the goal is to just prevent someone else from profiting off of Clemens's work without him (while still allowing community use).
The GPLv3 does allow profiting off his work though, so that might not be the best choice of license. Especially since hardware vendors often deliberately don't comply with the GPL, and the only recourse is an expensive lawsuit.
> "hardware vendors often deliberately don't comply with the GPL, and the only recourse is an expensive lawsuit."
Isn't that unrelated to exact license choice, and going to be the case with any software that's wants to be open source but not allow commercial use?
There's no license or wording in a license that can change the fact that, if you let people get the source for non-commercial use, there's nothing except the threat of lawsuits to stop anyone from ignoring the license and using it commercially.
Thats going to be the case with almost any license, people even violate the MIT/BSD licenses. One possible exception is CC0, since it has no conditions.
I really like the software & systems aspects of this, but I don't understand how homeowners are making the hardware work in non-ideal situations.
It would have to be constantly mowing my lawn in Texas or it would be at risk of trapping itself in a jungle. There is no way a robot mower could deal with 10+ days of growth in the summer. I can stall a 7hp+ 22" mower at practically any speed if I try to cut a full width strip in these conditions.
Yes that is exactly it. It mows every day or a couple days. The blades on these look about razor blade size. If you don’t mow for a week you would need to hit it with a real mower.
i have a mammotion luba 2 AWD and it's saved me days this summer! so much more time to spend with the kids and less time sweating.
i've had it running since May and it's been amazing so far. i hope it can continue going strong and that the product ecosystem around it continues to improve. if it falls apart, i dunno if i can go back to mowing the lawn without a robot. i recently wrote a review of my experience here: https://mfelix.org/reviews/mammotion-luba2/
it's not hard to see how given enough time, these things will completely replace a whole sector of human labor. why pay someone hundreds of dollars a month (or do the work yourself) when the robotic options are good enough?
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.
There are a number of supported mowers now, including ones sold in the USA, and the number will increase with the upcoming V2 board! Really all the activity is on the discord server -- the GitHub projects are secondary so it can seem much less active (and information is less up to date) if you look there
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
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.
Wouldn't the small solar robot have to move pretty fast in order for the blade to be able to cut through grass? I can't imagine cutting grass very effectively by just (manually) dragging a knife through it, it will just bend out of the way instead of cut won't it?
Well scythes are a typical way to cut grass, and they are basically just swinging a blade to do it - they just use a long handle to make it easy to move the blade fast enough.
I am imagining razor blades arranged like Vs. They don’t necessarily have to cut horizontally either. Cutting upwards would exploit the tension of the roots rather than overcoming the inertia mass of a blade of grass.
I have one of the best looking lawns in my neighborhood. I cut it whenever is most convenient for me. That might be any time between 9AM and 7PM. I cut it no matter the outside temperature. The only thing I avoid doing is cutting it while wet.
With such sweeping statements, it clearly matters to you. However, time matters to me. Others are entitled to have different priorities from you.
My Luba 2 has saved me 3 weeks of manual mowing over the past year and my lawn has never looked better. Frequently complemented by others.
It's just a lawn and a lawnmower. I'm not playing keeping up with the jones, hoa bullshit or whatever other nonsense Americans invent. It's just a Scottish garden for the wildlife to roam in.
Can the liability for damage to property or persons also be open sourced in the United States in case one of these things throws a rock and breaks a window or runs over an errant French Bulldog in spite of it "not supposed to be there in the first place" parameters?
If you think I'm kidding, I'm in Texas. If robotic mowing was in any way shape or form viable, it would be at an Enterprise Level here. IT IS NOT. Fields still take tractors and industrial level maintenance to avoid creating a public liability, aka, fire hazard. All these projects do in the short term is devalue the human who would otherwise be the one mowing the yard.
Want to impress me? Create a mobile Open Source AI / Tech powered MOBILE DENTISTRY SYSTEM that fits in a MB Sprinter Van and can come to communities and provide services at scale. My bad. I almost forgot solving problems is secondary to drumming up bullshit narratives to get funding.
>Can the liability for damage to property or persons also be open sourced in the United States in case one of these things throws a rock and breaks a window or runs over an errant French Bulldog in spite of it "not supposed to be there in the first place" parameters?
Man, between you and the hedgehog guy, y'all are hilarious. Yeah, if it throws a rock, you're liable for it. If it runs over a dog, that dog was already dead. Are you aware of how slowly these things move? I'll also chime in 'it's not supposed to be in my yard'.
>All these projects do in the short term is devalue the human who would otherwise be the one mowing the yard.
Funny how we all recognize AI in other domains frees up labor to work on more important things. I'm sure landscapers would love this.
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
Indeed. Sure, lawns do have their place, like for playing sports or for kids to play around. But otherwise, what a waste. Just plant some local flowers or whatever and have a meadow.
As an example, at some point my father stopped bothering to mow his lawn all the time (basically only once per year). It's now a nice meadow with all kinds of grasses. Frogs, butterflies, dragonflies, bees like it.
An additional issue with robotic mowers is that they tend to kill hedgehogs.
That's only an option in areas where the township will allow it.
Big reason to cut the grass is to keep pests away from the house.
That said, I rather consciously arrange deadfall along one steep bank between our house and that of a neighbor so as to encourage/foster lightning bug egg laying/larvae/pupae.
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
clowers work only if you never use the lawn, even with mild foot traffic it just dies off and you are left with patch of mud. all the biodiverse no lawn movement only works in pinterest photos and chronically online subredits. my lawn is for recreational activities outdoors, hard to do that in the mud or grass taller than my 7 year old.
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
„biodiversity“ as in „just let the place rot and get covered by weeds until trees and over stuff planted by you collapse due to the massive-and-aggressiveness of pests and pesty weeds.
„biodiversity“ as in a mix of roads, gutters and cars. There was a suggestion of introducing some footpaths to the mix but there was concern it was too much diversity.
a lot of folks don't understand permaculture when they first dive into it and end up in a bad situation. cultivating a pleasing ecosystem is both complicated a lot of work to get right, but eventually it can mostly take care of itself. sadly, traditional gardening doesn't really teach you how to maintain plants in concert or how to passively repel pests. it can be pretty rewarding to learn though if you don't mind getting into the science of it.
You don't like open source but want to ride off its good name so you're co-opting the term to mean something else. We already have a widely accepted term for this type of license - "source available".
It's worth noting that the project is CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0 however it comes with a notice that other licenses are available if you content them directly. So it may not be open source under the strict definition however the project is also not staunchly anti-commercial.
> Feel free to use the design in your private/educational projects, but don't try to sell the design or products based on it without getting my consent first. The idea here is to share knowledge, not to enable others to simply sell my work. Thank you for understanding.
Open source has been turned against us and used to build hyperscalers that effectively control modern computing.
Pure open source is also not a sustainable business model. You have to be open core or non-commercial, otherwise anyone and everyone can steal your lunch.
You're asking for the right to compete when they've given you every other single right there is. That's just not nice.
> Open source has been turned against us and used to build hyperscalers that effectively control modern computing.
> Pure open source is also not a sustainable business model. You have to be open core or non-commercial, otherwise anyone and everyone can steal your lunch.
Maybe, but beside the point. The point is "don't call whatever you're doing open source if it isn't open source (per the generally accepted definition which you can read e.g. at https://opensourcedefinition.org/ )". No moral judgement here whether open source is morally superior or not, or whether open source is for suckers because the hyperscalers will co-opt it, or whatever. If you don't want to do open source, then don't, but don't go and call it open source.
> Or WP Engine, which basically lifted WordPress wholesale and gives absolutely nothing back.
I understand (tho not agree with you) up until this point. Don’t forget Wordpress was not originally Wordpress, you would say they “basically lifted b2/cafepress wholesale and gave nothing back”. Wordpress wouldn’t exist otherwise.
> Open source purism - especially for non-viral MIT and BSD licenses - is how Google and Microsoft and Amazon stole from the commons and turned it against us.
So why don't you advocate for Free Software which has always worked in the interest of the commons and provided the GPL as a way to combat this, instead of something else that isn't free and restricts the freedom of users more than a weak license?
Because before your know it your very much open source company called Prusa will end up being competed with by subsidized stuff from the east based on your own work.
Ideally, yes, but ideals go out the window when your direct competitor is being unfairly subsidized, selling their products at a loss to steal your lunch and you realize that your continued good will on the software side will be the end of your existence.
> It's not my problem if someone from the Big Red East does something with my work as long as they share it too.
They also don't always do that. Look at the super popular BOOX e-ink notebooks. 100% in violation of the GPL, and has been for years, yet available to buy in common retailers such as Best Buy.
These are edging out popular devices, such as reMarkable, which are GPL compliant.
> I 100% commend CC-BY-SA-NC and other fair source licenses. These are sustainable efforts.
Funnily enough, the CC BY-SA-NC is not a fair source license, as it doesn’t include a provision for delayed open source publication. It is quite important, actually:
> DOSP ensures that if a Fair Source company goes out of business, or develops its products in an undesired direction, the community or another company can pick up and move forward. Will this be meaningful in practice? Again, time will tell. – https://fair.io/about/
My solution has been even simpler --- I just use a reel mower (on an admittedly small lawn, ~1/3rd of an acre) --- it's a decent workout, esp. when I strive to finish quickly.
(the one time I asked my son to cut the grass he broke the reel mower)
I'm on the scythe team, it's quite relaxing and a good workout, 0 noise, almost no insect/animals killed. Sure it's slow, but you can skip the gym for a few days after mowing, it hits my abs harder than 200kg dealifts or a day of rock climbing. < $100 for a top of the line that will serve you, your kids and their kids
Another reel mower user here. But our, uh, lawn, I guess you'd call it, has maybe 300 sq. ft of grass. Well, mostly grass. There's other stuff in there that I'm pretty sure is not grass? Come to think of it, 'mostly' grass at this point is a bit of an exaggeration. Also, in the spring violets. Which I leave for the bees until June. Rabbits come and help out too.
When I was a kid, mowing my father's lawn w/ a riding mower, I always detoured around the violets in the spring... these days, I will usually dig up and transplant any volunteers from the yard to the nearest suitable garden bed with open space.
LOL. I remember the day I phoned my dad and told him he didn't need to send me checks anymore (I was a student in college). Our relationship shifted overnight - he then treated me as a man rather than as a child.
> 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 recently (a few weeks ago) bought one. While researching on the available options (which seemed relevant to me), actually almost none of the robots work this way. Most of them systematically go through the lawn. I think from those that I checked, only the Worx Landroid does it randomly.
I was searching for some model which works without wires, because I was too lazy to set this up. Basically, in general, I wanted sth which required as little effort as possible.
I decided for eufy E15, which uses camera (no GPS, no wires, no lidar, nothing else really). And it just seems to work. It creates a map first, and then systematically goes over the lawn. I didn't really need to do anything.
(I'm not affiliated with eufy in any way. I'm just quite happy with it so far.)
That said, obviously, having an open source variant of such a robot would be even nicer (if it works)! So I'm quite happy to see such a project.
This robot here uses GPS, as far as I can see, as the sole technique for navigation and localization. From reports that I have read, GPS mostly works fine, except for some cases where it does not (where GPS coverage is not great). Camera on the other side always works (during daytime). Maybe this could be added to this project? Of course, using the camera is probably quite a bit more complicated, and more prone to errors, but overall might be more robust and reliable.
I have a Husqvarna and wouldn't be happier. It also randomly mows the lawn. I haven't paid a landscaper service forb3 years now. The only yard work I would need to care for are edge and bush trim. I have mostly flat yard with the size of 5000 sqft.
Wouldn’t it be kidnapped easily if it doesn’t use wires or GPS?
I often wonder about this.
I think GPS is essential. Tie it to a location - if stolen, it won't operate. Then a way to text you if it is moved outside the designated area. Telling you where it is.
At that point, I suppose it would still be worth stealing just for the battery? A hard problem to solve.
> if stolen, it won't operate.
I can assure you it won't have level of protection like say iPhone, there will be a factory reset button in the mower.
The problem with gps is it doesn't work (reliably) under trees which many lawns have. Since trees are common in yards they need something else anyway and at that point you can get rid of the gps
Need to get the multi-gnss like my cycling computer from Garmin has
It's so accurate it's scary. Shows me the what side of the road I'm on and even shows me how much I'm in the lane lol
that doesn't help when there is no signal which happens. Sometimes you can use other input to get more accurate, but only sometimes
In my case, my lawn isn't easily accessible and also not visible from the street (because the house and garage is between the street and the garden), and I trust my neighbors. So, I think (I hope) this isn't so much an issue for my case.
I think the eufy has also an optional GPS module just for this purpose, to better track it. I don't think this GPS module has any other purpose (e.g. it would not be used for navigation). But I didn't really checked the details on this.
I have seen this a few times for such robots, that you can buy an optional GPS module for tracking.
The sudden desire to add a small LLM and speech synthesizer so the mower can yell for help in a stranger danger scenario.
Third law of robotics: self protect!
Maybe instead of GPS or camera, it could have a local positioning system instead. 3 small, solar powered beacons can be installed around the yard to be mowed.
I have seen such variants as well, where you actually need to install some antennas (RTK antennas?).
But that was already too much effort for me, so that's why I chose the eufy. Also, from reports that I have read, it doesn't necessarily work better with antennas. Actually, from reports that I have read, robots with camera-only had the least amount of reports where navigation was not properly working. At least that was my impression.
How large is your lawn and is it mostly flat ? I want to try one for my lawn but I have very large lawn and one side is slopy/steep.
Maybe 300 m^2 or so.
The eufy E15 is for up to 800 m^2. There is the eufy E18 for up to 1200 m^2.
I have seen other (more expensive, bigger) robots for much larger lawns.
My garden is relatively flat with a few bumps here and there.
You can also easily mark some areas of the lawn as always excluded so that it wont drive there.
So is this like Valetudo[0] but for mowers? Very cool! I wonder how much overlap / shared code there is between robot vacuums and robot mowers.
[0]: https://valetudo.cloud/
Thanks for mentioning this. I did not know it existed, and it looks very interesting. I might try to "upgrade" my 7-year-old vacuum robot.
Unlike Valetudo, this uses the chassis and the motor of the lawn mower, but completely replaces electronics.
The Mowgli project is reusing the mainboard of the original lawnmower (might be enhanced with a RPi though). It's not currently as well-baked (or at least, well-trodden) as the default OpenMower approach which does indeed involve ripping out the mainboard and replacing it.
Thanks for the link, this is super useful. I will probably use both valetudo and openmower soon! Is there anything comparable for security cameras?
Camera firmware:
https://thingino.com https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44791984
https://openipc.org https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44758463
NVR:
https://frigate.video https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44794508
> Is there anything comparable for security cameras?
ReoLink + Frigate.
[0] https://frigate.video/
"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!)
I have a Mammotion Yuba and trust me, the grass looks awesome as a grid or in lines. It can even do logos. So far nicer looking grass and much faster then random.
I have a mix of older automowers (e.g. 315x) and newer bots like navimow x330.
The navimow does "mini stripes" and they do look nice, but the grass tends to look a little more "carpet" like with the automower randomized pattern.
It looks like obstacle avoidance is the key thing remaining in the software todos. For positioning it seems you get your pick of RTK GPS sensors, so it'd be interesting to still support guide wires for "escape protection".
Regardless of how good the perimeter wire bots are, it's also not true that the more advanced generation "sucks." I have one and it works perfectly fine (Mammotion Luba 2). The hardware is great, positioning is great; there is always stuff to nitpick on the software side but at the end of the day that's great as well.
Here's what robotic mowers blades look like to understand how they work - https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/676d76e61268a4...
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.
Please don't run them at night to protect animals like hedgehogs and others that are active at night.
Even better is to turn most of your lawn into natural landscape, leaving just the part you want to use for recreation as mowed.
This is highly dependent on where you live and what kind of creatures and insects you will be hosting.
I’m a big fan of natural landscaping, but just letting your grass over grow is not that.
I didn't say "just let it grow over" though. Turn it into natural landscape except the part you need for recreation. In many places people almost never play or sit in their front yard, for example. If you make that a natural landscape you might have to mow it once or less per year depending on what you actually plant.
It's a nice thought but the reality is that you'll be killing animals no matter what. I have a 48" riding mower and live in a rural area. At first I was really worried about all the field mice, voles, frogs, etc., that I saw running away from the mower. After a while, I realized that no matter how hard I tried, a certain number of them were just going to die. I tend to let my lawn grow fairly tall before cutting, and it's a mix of grasses, clovers, wildflowers and other plants that just grow naturally around here. The downside is that a lot of small animals live in it. I only remember running over one bunny so far, but who knows how many I might not have seen.
At least it's not fawns. Baby deer seem to be a magnet for combines harvesting corn.
Also to protect all those, animals and humans alike, who would like to enjoy a silent night.
I'm assuming (perhaps unreasonably?) that given the suggestion you could run it at night, that it's silent, or near silent?
If that's not the case, GP must be a madman.
Anything having lots of rpm ain't silent. Especially not at night.
So they surely ain't as loud as a combustion lawn mower and are pretty silent in comparison, so maybe you won't notice them in the city with its background noise. But in rural areas I perceive them as noisy even on daylight with normal noise level. And I never saw anyone using them at night - for a reason.
And as for gp .. he is already shadowbanned and you likely cannot see his answer (I have showdead=true). He reacted poorly I think.
Yeah, in that case, this sounds like a horrific idea.
I could hear a neighbours smoke alarm beeping periodically due to low battery the other night and went around to replace the battery for them the next day.
Also, I wasn't aware of the showdead setting (and had no idea about the answer that had been hidden), thanks for the tip.
chrip
There’s a growing discovery on YouTube and TikTok videos, that some people just live like this.
Your brain will completely tune the beeping sound out after a certain point, if it's a thing you notice at all. Similar reason to reversing truck beepers being replaced with ones that produce white (or other coloured) noise, so you don't lose your ability to hear where they are.
It's hard to believe until it happens to you.
Still hasn't happened to me; beeping smoke alarms drive me crazy.
Can only disagree there (I built an OpenMower based on a SA650B), in a rural area, also cannot hear it from about 10m away, even at night. Though I don't run it at night except when it is just finishing up from the afternoon
Either there is a new generation of ultra silent mowers, or we have vastly different hearing levels.
Edit: but I only know of mowers noise level from what I experience walking around, I don't own one, nor did I research that model number. Maybe I will.
Must depend on the model. I can't hear mine from more than 10 meters away.
At night?
I doubt that. At daylight with normal background noise level, possible.
Electric motors can run at quite high rpms with lower decibels. Sure not silent but the origin is low enough that at a distance say 25 feet it’s almost silent.
True, but remember what’s quiet to a human may be quite different to what’s quiet to a hedgehog. When reading about these things it’s surprising how often things that we might not consider - like how vibrations travel though the ground - can confuse wildlife in ways that we might not expect when viewed through an anthropomorphic lens.
Man I'm sorry, while I don't want my mower running over a hedgehog, it's my lawn. If they don't like the noise they can leave lol
Yea, my neighbors battery powered mower is super quiet. I don't even know when they run it.
Mine is also electric and my wife says (i'm always too close to it) it's easily 4x as loud. Not sure what the difference is.
> And I never saw anyone using them at night - for a reason.
...how late you were checking?
I can see reason to set them on say 5AM so it finishes before you wake up
you've never been woken up at 5am by a neighbor using some tools?
I have an electric (though not robotic) lawn mower, and it turns out that it's not much quieter than a gas powered one. No engine noise obviously, but the blades spinning and hitting grass still makes a lot of noise (and indeed in my case it turned out to be the vast majority of the noise). So it wouldn't be a very good idea to run your robot lawn mower at night.
This is uninformed - my Navimow is close to silent. It makes a slight clicking/snipping sound as it cuts through grass.
The mechanical components are entirely different, instead of a helicopter-like blade it is a ~silent solid disc with some razor blades on the edges.
It probably depends on model, but mine is dead silent (Mammotion Luba 2). However the reason I avoid running it at night is it has a fairly bright headlight, and I worry it might create shadows/light effects in my neighbors house and I know they have little kids.
I mean how fast do these mowers mow? I seriously doubt it's fast enough to run over an animal
I think the concern is animals that hide or sit still when threatened more so than it chasing down a rabbit :p Also, eventually animals would get used to the noise until they get hurt.
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The wildlife (like hedgehogs) will feel very audited when they get sliced up by a razorblade, run over, and can barely drag themselves off your lawn to bleed out throughout hours of pain. If they don't bleed out, they often end up mutilated, unable to properly eat, walk, etc.
Nice wildlife auditing. Hedgehogs are endangered in lots of areas of the world. Run your robot lawnmower during the day.
If you don't like that mental image, you should feel for the people working at hedgehog rescues
They're certainly not endangered. They were "Least Concern" up until the last few years but have been reclassified as "Near Threatened" due to greenfield sites turned over to land development fragmenting their habitats. The most likely place a person will see them in 2025 is flattened on a road.
Domestic gardens make up an almost insignificant percentage of their natural habitat in any case, and any sort of HOA or Estate Management scenario would likely make it a violation to rewild a garden sufficient to create an amenable hedgehog habitat.
In short, its the responsibility of land utilised for agriculture - and this is recognised by measures around Europe such as the Eco-Scheme and ACRES (Agri-Climate Rural Environment Scheme) which indirectly support the re-establishment of hedgehog populations.
Hedgehogs ignore loud moving things going their direction ?
No, but they curl up into a ball to protect themselves. Since they're spiky, that seems to work reasonably well against animals. Less so against blades.
My dogs will eat them if they get hit. It's not a problem.
The price still needs to come down for what is effectively a slightly more rugged robot vaccuum. I could buy a used car for that, and have enough left over to make it run reliably.
The quality of cheaper models is not great. I bought two from Einhell (power tool brand like DeWalt in Europe) and they both had to be returned due to motor failures. A replacement motor was €150 - for a €400 robot without battery (it uses their 18V tool batteries which is what appealed to me - easy replacement).
The thing is, they are more than a robot vacuum. They need to be able to:
- deal with rougher, bumpier terrain (friction!)
- do so uphill through uncut grass
- not stall the mowing motor with high grass
- cover a larger area
- be waterproof against rain
All of these points need a lot more power individually, and especially so when taken together (and carrying the weight increase of all those upgrades). It seems reasonable they'd cost at least twice as much for "similar" feature/budget levels. And I think that's pretty much what we're seeing.
My father just picked up a Husqvarna 430x to do his yard, and it's a pretty great piece of equipment. It runs basically around the clock and handles his acre on a hillside with relative ease... It finds a couple of the garden beds a bit tricky to navigate, but that'll be a software issue that likely improves as time goes on.
Their website lists the X7 as "0.75 acres" - how that relate to the 4acres you got it to do?
How well does it cut 2 acres? how long does it take?
I’ve been watching the “Lymow One” with great interest because it appears a lot more rugged and it uses actual mower-style blades rather than the rotating-disc-and-razors model. Also claims to be able to take care of 1.7 acres, which is about spot on what I need.
It’s still pretty new though, and it's a kickstarter from a new company so not much trust yet.
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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.
I would love to hear more about this if you have information online anywhere.
I gave up on having an electric mower any time soon since I have a riding mower and a garden tractor that simply won't die. I really don't want to buy something new if I can keep repairing old stuff, no matter how annoying it gets.
However, I am interested in building an electric UTV in large part because it would be quieter than my Honda Foreman.
Do you have any links to your work?
> And the prices of these new and used are out of this world even compared to baseline inflation.
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?
No amount of things like grass mowers can add up to it.
You have to look at stuff people buy in large volume, like food, housing, energy, education, and health-care.
(By the way, I don't know if your figures are correct. I don't even know what country you are at.)
From what I gather you can measure inflation many different ways. It’s not an absolute value but more of an average of prices on some number of goods. Kind of like how there are many index funds having different mixes of securities.
This is as much a complaint about high prices as the fact that Briggs & Stratton keeps making and selling an engine with an absolutely awful design.
If you want the boring details: it is a single cylinder 4 stroke motor. The first issue is that while it is dead simple, it does not have a modern way to control the RPM. These motors are meant to run at roughly 3600 RPM but at full throttle (how they are meant to be operated once in use) they will easily exceed that especially with no load such as in neutral. So they have a mechanical governor, which is also combined with an oil slinger (exactly what it sounds like: it is just a thing that slings oil all over the place hoping to get it onto the parts that need it). This contraption looks like this: https://www.lawnmowerpros.com/prodimages/691968.jpg. It is not very sturdy and is not very well mounted. It tends to break or even jam the gears between the crankshaft and the camshaft. This is bad because you don’t want loose pieces flying inside the bottom end of the motor.
In addition these motors have puny starters, so they have what’s called a compression release, which is a weight and a spring on the cam shaft. You can see it right by the gear here: https://www.briggsbits.co.uk/acatalog/84005207.3.jpeg
The idea is that at low RPM such as while you start the engine, the tiny spring will hold the weight to the shaft and the bump on it will keep the exhaust valve slightly open. This will mean you don’t get normal combustion but also it will be a lot easier to turn the engine over which is important for the puny starter. At higher RPM the weight will fly out and the other side with the bump will retract causing the exhaust valve to close fully when necessary.
The issue with this design is that the spring as you can see is tiny and thin and the weight is also pretty flimsy. They tend to break off and then you have a chunk of metal again.
Speaking of the camshaft, notice that the cam lobes are pressed onto the camshaft, not cut out of a single piece of steel. This is cheap but tends to be very sloppy. These motors don’t run very well.
And lastly, while these motors have a (tiny) oil pump and it is properly driven by the camshaft, the part that drives the oil pump is actually a separate piece of shaft that just slots into the main shaft of the camshaft. You can see it here as the short shaft with two flat parts on either end: https://www.lsengineers.co.uk/media/catalog/product/cache/21...
This means the camshaft isn’t even straight necessarily but is gear driven which requires more precision than chain, not less.
This is before we get into just basics like the fact that none of them have proper head/cylinder mating surfaces so they blow head gaskets like crazy, or their very loose rockers that go out of spec all the time causing it to run very poorly and needing constant adjustment. This is the same exact engine in every smaller riding mower on the market today. If you don’t get this one, you will get a much worse Kohler equivalent.
An equivalent Honda engine I could swap into my mower would cost me $2,000 for a refurb. Harbor Freight used to sell a motor for this for $800 but discontented it a few years ago. Basically, the entire market segment is shit. Greenworks and Ryobi have the electric mowers for about $5,000 that don’t seem to have these issues but batteries don’t have nearly the energy density than the two gallon of gas which is what it takes to run a normal mower for an hour.
Is this a newer design? Asking because I have a 40-year-old Murray garden tractor with an 18hp 2-cylinder Briggs 4-stroke and while it's harder to start in winter now (snowblower duty), it doesn't show any sign of dying soon.
This is the Intek single cylinder 500cc that is rated for 16-18hp depending on who you get it from (though internally they are all the same). I do think it is newer but not that new. Their V twins are apparently a bit more bulletproof though I haven’t taken mine apart to check. That’s the one that catches fire now due to bad wiring.
If the poster is in the USA couldn't it be explained by Trump Tariffs (in addition to inflation)
Yes I am in the US but in so far as inflation is an overall increase in cost of goods and services, the tariffs are one contributing factor to it. How much of a factor is probably hard to tell but my gut feeling says in this case it is probably significant.
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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 :)
My uncle used a semi-DIY lawn mower for many years where he had replaced the original broken engine with an old electric drill. Worked fine enough.
>I'm on the lookout for new challenges.
Please mod your mower to automatically pick up litter along road edges, and sell it to Caltrans at dot.ca.gov
Might be best to not mow that lawn, think of the bees instead.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00063...
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.
Would you mind sharing any pictures or video about the mower? I converted my push reel to electric without a kit, and have been considering putting separate high torque, low speed motors for drive wheel control to start moving towards autonomous cutting. Would be great to see your experience!
I made it for my country home and won’t be there for a bit but maybe one day I’ll document it. But the parts store I used closed down, Open Builds Part Store. It’s nothing proprietary to them, I just got all the v slot aluminum frame and connectors there to build the chassis. Then I got hub motor wheels on Amazon or Aliexpress and batteries too. Most small components I get on Amazon, motor controller. I went with off-road air filled tires. And I wrote all then logic into an arduino mega. Oh and I used an upside down rubber made container as the case for electronics. Everything is mounted to the bottom of the lid and the box part is functionally the lid that I remove to gain access. It as built in snap locks and I used weather stripping to make the seal tight.
You just have to figure out how to mount to the lawn mower part of your choice, after than it’s the same as building any vehicle.
> after than it’s the same as building any vehicle
LOL. Love this line ;-)
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!)
How difficult was it to get the needed hardware in the US? It seems hard or expensive to do so.
The yardforce500 is hard to find in the USA, but it's extremely cheap in Europe. I found a great deal and paid $208 for the mower and $135 for a package forwarder to ship it from Germany. I have a complete spreadsheet of my expenses here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BV8VCtqTer8iodXvyRd1...
Nice!
How much time did it take you from the moment you started the project to the point where it fell like it was up & running?
It's hard to put a specific number on it, since it's been progressively improving the whole time I had it. I bought it in the fall of 2023, and got it "running" then, but it was not actually doing any useful work. Summer of 2024 it was doing useful work but required constant hand holding and a series of hardware and software upgrades to get it more stable. This year it is actually doing the majority of the mowing. It still requires frequent rescue but it's a lot less work than actually mowing the lawn myself.
However my lawn is probably the most difficult lawn of any openmower user. I'm in Vermont, so I have very steep terrain, a bumpy yard, poor GPS reception, very wet weather, and also my lawn is very large and complex shaped. For a simple use case it would be working great a long time ago. I also chose to do a "Mowgli" build which is based on more reverse engineering, which added complexity and unreliability (but saved some money).
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?
It does not have obstacle avoidance, the best it has is recognizing it keeps getting stuck and skipping the next goal until it finds a goal it can reach. This can often look like obstacle avoidance since the next goal might be in a slightly different direction and so it will be able to continue. This is aided by a new feature that I added which will make the mower back up first when it gets stuck before continuing.
However, I should note that it's a hackable ROS system, so people have added obstacle detection with various sensors on their mowers. There is just not official support or a standard way to do it.
I've mowed with it this summer and last summer, and there hasn't been downtime at much as repeatedly getting stuck and requiring me to bring it back to the dock (although less and less). But my lawn is probably the hardest lawn any Openmower mows, as I mentioned in a cousin comment.
I dream of a day when my Mammotion Luba gets some decent working software. The HW is stellar, the SF is EXTREMELY bad :/
Agreed, the Mammotion hardware is amazing - the app is horrible. An open API would solve this as well, but there's little chance with the Chinese owners.
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CC-BY-SA 4.0 is an interesting choice. I know this isn't a ShowHN, but was this chosen because it's copyleft, but hardware?
The hardware+software used to both be under that same non commercial cc license, but there was recently a relicense of the software to GPL3. I think the goal is to just prevent someone else from profiting off of Clemens's work without him (while still allowing community use).
The GPLv3 does allow profiting off his work though, so that might not be the best choice of license. Especially since hardware vendors often deliberately don't comply with the GPL, and the only recourse is an expensive lawsuit.
> "hardware vendors often deliberately don't comply with the GPL, and the only recourse is an expensive lawsuit."
Isn't that unrelated to exact license choice, and going to be the case with any software that's wants to be open source but not allow commercial use?
There's no license or wording in a license that can change the fact that, if you let people get the source for non-commercial use, there's nothing except the threat of lawsuits to stop anyone from ignoring the license and using it commercially.
Thats going to be the case with almost any license, people even violate the MIT/BSD licenses. One possible exception is CC0, since it has no conditions.
I really like the software & systems aspects of this, but I don't understand how homeowners are making the hardware work in non-ideal situations.
It would have to be constantly mowing my lawn in Texas or it would be at risk of trapping itself in a jungle. There is no way a robot mower could deal with 10+ days of growth in the summer. I can stall a 7hp+ 22" mower at practically any speed if I try to cut a full width strip in these conditions.
Like auto-vacuums changed user-habits from vacuuming one a week to running the machine daily, so too will auto-lawn mowers.
It _is_ supposed to run constantly.
Yes that is exactly it. It mows every day or a couple days. The blades on these look about razor blade size. If you don’t mow for a week you would need to hit it with a real mower.
So this includes a CC licensed RTK base and remote? That's pretty cool.
i have a mammotion luba 2 AWD and it's saved me days this summer! so much more time to spend with the kids and less time sweating.
i've had it running since May and it's been amazing so far. i hope it can continue going strong and that the product ecosystem around it continues to improve. if it falls apart, i dunno if i can go back to mowing the lawn without a robot. i recently wrote a review of my experience here: https://mfelix.org/reviews/mammotion-luba2/
it's not hard to see how given enough time, these things will completely replace a whole sector of human labor. why pay someone hundreds of dollars a month (or do the work yourself) when the robotic options are good enough?
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.
This is really neat, but it seems like the one supported mower isn't officially available in North America.
Has anyone here made this project work with a mower that's easily available here?
There are a number of supported mowers now, including ones sold in the USA, and the number will increase with the upcoming V2 board! Really all the activity is on the discord server -- the GitHub projects are secondary so it can seem much less active (and information is less up to date) if you look there
I had posted this several years back trying to figure out options in NA without much luck: https://github.com/ClemensElflein/OpenMower/issues/8
Sounds like the hardware platform isn't available anywhere at all now.
Some titles I upvote without first following the link.
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
A compromise solution that cuts way down on complexity is remote controlled. Any suggestions for similar projects but RC instead of autonomous?
Hook it up to the Internet and get the top Lawn Mowing Simulator players to do it for free.
Very cool project, but CC-BY-NC-SA is "source available", not opensource :-(
Looks like the software project ( https://github.com/ClemensElflein/open_mower_ros ) uses GPL-3.0.
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.
Wouldn't the small solar robot have to move pretty fast in order for the blade to be able to cut through grass? I can't imagine cutting grass very effectively by just (manually) dragging a knife through it, it will just bend out of the way instead of cut won't it?
Well scythes are a typical way to cut grass, and they are basically just swinging a blade to do it - they just use a long handle to make it easy to move the blade fast enough.
https://m.youtube.com/results?search_query=scythe+grass+cut
(I've no idea about the physics of required speed or blade sharpness, so don't know how feasible or not a robot cutting this way would be.)
I am imagining razor blades arranged like Vs. They don’t necessarily have to cut horizontally either. Cutting upwards would exploit the tension of the roots rather than overcoming the inertia mass of a blade of grass.
Goat?
Turtle bots.
If that is your dream, then have you considered replacing grass with turf? No growth to worry about!
You cannot just trim grass all day unless you want a terrible lawn. You need to cut at the right hours.
I have one of the best looking lawns in my neighborhood. I cut it whenever is most convenient for me. That might be any time between 9AM and 7PM. I cut it no matter the outside temperature. The only thing I avoid doing is cutting it while wet.
I’m not sure what your criteria is, but mine is to keep the grass alive and provide root structure for my soil.
Aesthetics matter.
square of grass is one of most boring things you can do aescethically with lawn
With such sweeping statements, it clearly matters to you. However, time matters to me. Others are entitled to have different priorities from you.
My Luba 2 has saved me 3 weeks of manual mowing over the past year and my lawn has never looked better. Frequently complemented by others.
It's just a lawn and a lawnmower. I'm not playing keeping up with the jones, hoa bullshit or whatever other nonsense Americans invent. It's just a Scottish garden for the wildlife to roam in.
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I wonder how these guys know how install the new os or bypass the os that come with the bot
They don't, it's a mainboard replacement project
this is cool
i’m gonna anthropomorphize it
It’s too bad this mower doesn’t appear readily available in North America.
Two discussions about Larry Ellison battling it out for 14th and 15th place:
14. An IRC-Enabled Lawn Mower (idlerpg.net)
15. OpenMower – An Open Source Lawn Mower (github.com/clemenselflein)
You wouldn't anthropomorphize a lawn mower would you?
Mowagotchi!
Unexpected bcantrill.
Can the liability for damage to property or persons also be open sourced in the United States in case one of these things throws a rock and breaks a window or runs over an errant French Bulldog in spite of it "not supposed to be there in the first place" parameters?
If you think I'm kidding, I'm in Texas. If robotic mowing was in any way shape or form viable, it would be at an Enterprise Level here. IT IS NOT. Fields still take tractors and industrial level maintenance to avoid creating a public liability, aka, fire hazard. All these projects do in the short term is devalue the human who would otherwise be the one mowing the yard.
Want to impress me? Create a mobile Open Source AI / Tech powered MOBILE DENTISTRY SYSTEM that fits in a MB Sprinter Van and can come to communities and provide services at scale. My bad. I almost forgot solving problems is secondary to drumming up bullshit narratives to get funding.
>Can the liability for damage to property or persons also be open sourced in the United States in case one of these things throws a rock and breaks a window or runs over an errant French Bulldog in spite of it "not supposed to be there in the first place" parameters?
Man, between you and the hedgehog guy, y'all are hilarious. Yeah, if it throws a rock, you're liable for it. If it runs over a dog, that dog was already dead. Are you aware of how slowly these things move? I'll also chime in 'it's not supposed to be in my yard'.
>All these projects do in the short term is devalue the human who would otherwise be the one mowing the yard.
Funny how we all recognize AI in other domains frees up labor to work on more important things. I'm sure landscapers would love this.
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
Indeed. Sure, lawns do have their place, like for playing sports or for kids to play around. But otherwise, what a waste. Just plant some local flowers or whatever and have a meadow.
As an example, at some point my father stopped bothering to mow his lawn all the time (basically only once per year). It's now a nice meadow with all kinds of grasses. Frogs, butterflies, dragonflies, bees like it.
An additional issue with robotic mowers is that they tend to kill hedgehogs.
That's only an option in areas where the township will allow it.
Big reason to cut the grass is to keep pests away from the house.
That said, I rather consciously arrange deadfall along one steep bank between our house and that of a neighbor so as to encourage/foster lightning bug egg laying/larvae/pupae.
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
clowers work only if you never use the lawn, even with mild foot traffic it just dies off and you are left with patch of mud. all the biodiverse no lawn movement only works in pinterest photos and chronically online subredits. my lawn is for recreational activities outdoors, hard to do that in the mud or grass taller than my 7 year old.
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
„biodiversity“ as in „just let the place rot and get covered by weeds until trees and over stuff planted by you collapse due to the massive-and-aggressiveness of pests and pesty weeds.
„biodiversity“ as in a mix of roads, gutters and cars. There was a suggestion of introducing some footpaths to the mix but there was concern it was too much diversity.
a lot of folks don't understand permaculture when they first dive into it and end up in a bad situation. cultivating a pleasing ecosystem is both complicated a lot of work to get right, but eventually it can mostly take care of itself. sadly, traditional gardening doesn't really teach you how to maintain plants in concert or how to passively repel pests. it can be pretty rewarding to learn though if you don't mind getting into the science of it.
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> Open Source
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...
It's open source to people and organizations who are not assholes and thieves.
I don't care about my fake internet points, so have at it.
I kinda think "open" is a word that's immediately undermined by any qualification.
I'm really down for more variety with licenses like this one, but "open source" has become really unhelpful because it's used for:
- Open source for half the code, and the other half is proprietary
- Open source as long as you aren't a company
- Open source as long as you aren't a company competing with us
It's helpful to have a term for "free to do whatever you want with", but we don't really have on that doesn't get misused elsewhere right now.
You don't like open source but want to ride off its good name so you're co-opting the term to mean something else. We already have a widely accepted term for this type of license - "source available".
It's worth noting that the project is CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0 however it comes with a notice that other licenses are available if you content them directly. So it may not be open source under the strict definition however the project is also not staunchly anti-commercial.
> Feel free to use the design in your private/educational projects, but don't try to sell the design or products based on it without getting my consent first. The idea here is to share knowledge, not to enable others to simply sell my work. Thank you for understanding.
It's simply not open source. It doesn't meet the definition.
It's co-opting the term to call it open source.
This has been debated and settled. What people mean by open source or free software has a well agreed upon definition, and this isn't it.
Open source has been turned against us and used to build hyperscalers that effectively control modern computing.
Pure open source is also not a sustainable business model. You have to be open core or non-commercial, otherwise anyone and everyone can steal your lunch.
You're asking for the right to compete when they've given you every other single right there is. That's just not nice.
> Open source has been turned against us and used to build hyperscalers that effectively control modern computing.
> Pure open source is also not a sustainable business model. You have to be open core or non-commercial, otherwise anyone and everyone can steal your lunch.
Maybe, but beside the point. The point is "don't call whatever you're doing open source if it isn't open source (per the generally accepted definition which you can read e.g. at https://opensourcedefinition.org/ )". No moral judgement here whether open source is morally superior or not, or whether open source is for suckers because the hyperscalers will co-opt it, or whatever. If you don't want to do open source, then don't, but don't go and call it open source.
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> Or WP Engine, which basically lifted WordPress wholesale and gives absolutely nothing back.
I understand (tho not agree with you) up until this point. Don’t forget Wordpress was not originally Wordpress, you would say they “basically lifted b2/cafepress wholesale and gave nothing back”. Wordpress wouldn’t exist otherwise.
But OpenSource has a special meaning.
Just give it another name that doesn’t imply wrong assumption what can and can’t do with it.
> I'm sick of open source purism.
> Open source purism - especially for non-viral MIT and BSD licenses - is how Google and Microsoft and Amazon stole from the commons and turned it against us.
So why don't you advocate for Free Software which has always worked in the interest of the commons and provided the GPL as a way to combat this, instead of something else that isn't free and restricts the freedom of users more than a weak license?
Because before your know it your very much open source company called Prusa will end up being competed with by subsidized stuff from the east based on your own work.
I don't belive in "open source", I believe in free software.
So what? They make something better, so I take what they did and improve my product.
It's not my problem if someone from the Big Red East does something with my work as long as they share it too.
Ideally, yes, but ideals go out the window when your direct competitor is being unfairly subsidized, selling their products at a loss to steal your lunch and you realize that your continued good will on the software side will be the end of your existence.
> It's not my problem if someone from the Big Red East does something with my work as long as they share it too.
They also don't always do that. Look at the super popular BOOX e-ink notebooks. 100% in violation of the GPL, and has been for years, yet available to buy in common retailers such as Best Buy.
These are edging out popular devices, such as reMarkable, which are GPL compliant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onyx_Boox#GPL_compliance
Uh huh. Why don't you draft me up a license that magically keeps people from violating its rules, then.
> I 100% commend CC-BY-SA-NC and other fair source licenses. These are sustainable efforts.
Funnily enough, the CC BY-SA-NC is not a fair source license, as it doesn’t include a provision for delayed open source publication. It is quite important, actually:
> DOSP ensures that if a Fair Source company goes out of business, or develops its products in an undesired direction, the community or another company can pick up and move forward. Will this be meaningful in practice? Again, time will tell. – https://fair.io/about/
But I do agree with the sentiment otherwise.
My dad's solution was simple: "Mow the lawn!" directed at me.
My solution has been even simpler --- I just use a reel mower (on an admittedly small lawn, ~1/3rd of an acre) --- it's a decent workout, esp. when I strive to finish quickly.
(the one time I asked my son to cut the grass he broke the reel mower)
I'm on the scythe team, it's quite relaxing and a good workout, 0 noise, almost no insect/animals killed. Sure it's slow, but you can skip the gym for a few days after mowing, it hits my abs harder than 200kg dealifts or a day of rock climbing. < $100 for a top of the line that will serve you, your kids and their kids
Respect!
(I used a scythe when I was much younger for haying on the less than 5 acres my father owned and _that_ was a workout)
There is the steeply angled bank mentioned elsethread which I arguably should cut thus... maybe next year.
Reel mowers are also nicer for allergy sufferers - no dust etc thrown up in the air, no gasoline exhaust. Not to mention fairly quiet.
Obvious downsides are can't cope with some species (too low to ground, etc) or with sticks etc if near a wooded area.
I made another comment about it but consider adding a drivetrain. My v1 was RC but then I added lidar when I got tired of driving it by controller.
If it becomes easier to do, then I get less exercise --- getting the Fiskars w/ the chain drive gearing was as much reduction as I can justify.
Gotcha. I’m optimizing for least calories expended ;D
Another reel mower user here. But our, uh, lawn, I guess you'd call it, has maybe 300 sq. ft of grass. Well, mostly grass. There's other stuff in there that I'm pretty sure is not grass? Come to think of it, 'mostly' grass at this point is a bit of an exaggeration. Also, in the spring violets. Which I leave for the bees until June. Rabbits come and help out too.
When I was a kid, mowing my father's lawn w/ a riding mower, I always detoured around the violets in the spring... these days, I will usually dig up and transplant any volunteers from the yard to the nearest suitable garden bed with open space.
I've had quail nesting in my yard. I didn't bother them with the mower until the chicks matured and left.
That's why I moved out.
LOL. I remember the day I phoned my dad and told him he didn't need to send me checks anymore (I was a student in college). Our relationship shifted overnight - he then treated me as a man rather than as a child.