OpenMower – An open source lawn mower

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.

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.

I dream of a day when my Mammotion Luba gets some decent working software. The HW is stellar, the SF is EXTREMELY bad :/

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.

Some titles I upvote without first following the link.

>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

So this includes a CC licensed RTK base and remote? That's pretty cool.

When I read the title I remembered how people in the 90s at my place built their lawn mowers. It was a new thing. My father welded the frame from scrap metal with the motor from a washing machine and some tiny wheels from an old baby stroller lol. It was kind of open source, many people copied or he helped build one. Haha, served us surprisingly well for a time :)

I 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.

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?

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)

this is cool