The hard part was making it look nice. The people that pay high prices for lawn care want it to look it a certain way. I couldn’t get over that hurdle.
I could but it would’ve been me driving over the already cut grass with specific grooming tools, and effectively negating any benefits of me over traditional labor.
I really think this tech is the future, and I’m glad there’s FOSS solutions to get hobbyists 90% of the way. The last 10% is going to be the real struggle for a startup.
Then use your revenues to iterate on a version for people that want a lawn that looks like plastic.
The only downside is that I'd need decent monitoring to alert me that I need to intervene before a serious mow is needed.
A very small nitpick: OpenMower is not FOSS as it's restrictively licensed prohibiting commercial use (https://github.com/ClemensElflein/OpenMower/blob/main/LICENS...).
Autonomous lawn mowers are everywhere in my neighborhood, albeit being quite expensive. Some even have two for front and back.
Unless you have a very big yard or a very small yard it is quite literally "the thing to have" right now.
This is a huge market in central Europe.
Then use an algorithm to get the stripes in the right places.
Of course a person is allowed to license their software however they like. However, I might also note that creative commons is not recommended as a license for code: https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-comm....
Not saying that it cannot work, but this has so much hurdles to overcome before being something that can work, let alone be produced (at home) or mass-produced and sold, that its at most "really interesting".
If you just wanted to switch between a small number of pre-set heights (and changing those heights could be manual), a cam arrangement is probably better.
The goal is to have an electric rope mower for the biggest part of my back yard that happens to have a 110v outlet in the very center (septic alarm pedestal).
Maybe a full size riding mower would have something automated there? So you'd turn that into a robotic one?
Using that primitive, you can make a lawn mower.
wow, that's awesome (I mean, the whole project is awesome, but that's an especially user friendly touch)
I think a sickle style mower is the future of electric mowers as they use less energy per blade of grass cut
I have half-finished contraption on my garage desk, consisting of hoverboard electronics and motors (cheapest battery, motor, power electronics combo), PX4 autopilot and a spinning disc with Husqvarna razorblades as cutter. Time will tell if I muster enough energy to deal with the rest of the plan this summer- Raspberry Pi running ROS and Kinect for SLAM.
Right now though, it's just a scary RC vehicle capable of doing wheelies (hoverboard motors have a lot of torque).
