cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/36230046
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!
Therefore, we have disassembled the cheapest off-the-shelf robotic mower we could find (YardForce Classic 500) and were surprised that the hardware itself is actually quite decent:
- Geared sensored brushless motors for the wheels
- A sensored brushless motor for the mower motor itself
- The whole construction seems robust, waterproof and all in all thought through
- All components are connected using standard connectors, therefore upgrading the hardware is easily possible.
The bottom line is: The bot itself is surprisingly high quality and doesn’t need to be changed at all. We just need some better software in there.
I have a similar idea for one day when we can actually use the government for good again. We should build a low bandwidth nationwide digital radio network. Not owned by corporations but by the people. Include things like rtk capability by default. The telecomms and isps will try to fight this with billions of inflation dollars, but if we do manage to get this in, everyone could have access to the internet at low speeds without paying, and it would be relativly easy to maintain. An open standard that would allow many cool technologies like robotics that are much safer and precise.
Potential aplications are, nonsibscription medical devices, realtime rtk everywhere, a huge boon for construction with a standard coordinate system. Documenting things like underground cables and pipes easily. Property lines. Self driving cars that can communicate with each other and work together. Access to the internet and communications for the poor. Cheap animal tracking collars. Drones that can fly across the country without needing a data plan. So many things. It would be an efficency gain accross the entire economy.
Look at meshtastic, it’s only text messages but the underlying system could be iterated on.
Who’s going to pay for my extra electricity costs to run my antenna and amplifier that supports this radio network? Who’s going to pay for my maintenance and upkeep costs?
Unless you are running a mesh node or joining the global supercompute cluster, you wouldnt need to run any hardware. I more mean like a network of towers run by the state using sub 1000 MGHz freqiencies or soemthing, to get good range, maybe even lower frequencies. You could maybe get like 50+ mile range with small devices at low power if you had the right spectrum. Perhaps a fallback mode of several hundred miles for low speed mode.
This probably wouldn’t be something that you as a person is running the HW for, so you have no direct expense to HW or maintenance. This would likely be government driven and paid through taxes. Its basically just NPR, but with low bandwidth internet instead.
For readers in the future, NPR was a show from back when we had public radio…
I just bought a Mammotion robot mower 2 months ago. It’s been working well and I only have minor complaints. I definitely would’ve looked into this if I hadn’t gotten my mower yet. Note that so far the author can only guarantee it works on only one model, the one they tested it on.
I need this but for Roombas.
Check out Valetudo.
It’s so ironic that valetudo doesn’t support roomba considering roombas used to be a hackable robotics platform, even selling the robots without the vacuum components, with many models of vacuums shipping with serial ports right on top.
Been using valetudo for years. Love it.
The world has needed it for printers for decades.
OMG, yes please 🙏
Hasn’t this problem long been solved in roomba’s? Mine is about 8 years old and it doesn’t go around randomly. I assumed all new models don’t do that anymore, except for some very cheap off brand vacuum robots.
You can’t compare indoors and outdoors directly. I think random has its means in an uneven environment. It simply doesn’t matter if the odometry sucks, if the wheels stick in muddy earth or small sticks block on side.
Advanced sensors such as GPS and cam isn’t very precise outdoors. That’s why newer models come with its own positioning sender.
I was mostly talking about roombas/indoor. For outdoors you have GPS with RTK which most mowers use that work without a boundary wire, afaik.
I mean the open firmware. And mine is older.
Yes that would be nice to have. Sadly when I bought my Roomba I didn’t care too much about that. My next one will be hackable though.
