[Johndavid400] built this incredible looking R/C lawnmower. After spending some time repairing broken R/C cars, he wanted to move on to something a little more useful and powerful. He decided to build a mower. He’s using a transceiver set from ebay, with an Arduino interpreting the signal and outputting to his custom motor board. In the video after the break, you can see that the mower looks responsive and quick. He does note, however, that he had some glitches early in the process that left him with a runaway mower. We covered a very similar mower ages ago that used a wheelchair as the base.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpMazvf-R98]
[via littlebirdceo]
Cool project. Again, though, this is one of those projects where safety should be considered. I’m not saying that it’s so unsafe that it shouldn’t be done, but if your skilled enough to do the project in the first place, then you should be skilled enough to put proper safety features into it as suggested by Mr. Snuffelump towards the top of this thread.
As for the issue of American’s mowing their lawns, there are a numnber of reasons for it. As mentioned, many towns and cities will fine you if you let your lawn grow too high. Also, in many parts of the country, there are serious issues with ticks (a type of small bug that lives in tall grass, jumps on animals as they pass by, and sucks blood) spreading diseases such as Lymes Disease. One of ways to limit the spread is to keep the grass short.
The picture made me chuckle, great project.
I got bored reading all the comments, some good ideas in there, but we started getting some people nit picking over whether or not a mic.controller was needed, then the arduino bashers jumped in…yawn…I may from future not read the comments.
People in the robot fighting community have been doing this for years…over a decade, actually. Nice implementation, but if you guys are really into this, check out the fighting robot competitions (yes, like BattleBots). It’s still around and a lot of fun…
http://robogames.net/events.php
http://botleague.net/
http://www.robotbooks.com/robot-competition-links.htm
I’m telling you, we are on our way to ‘wall-e’ times baby!!!!! I would love to do that to mine.
I guess the “badtimes” virus is finally going to be a reality… :D
cool idea but i want to see someone mow and entire lawn without walking be mower to make sure your mowing straight so that the yard looks good. i think i would probably look like a 6yr old mowed it with lots of uneven or missed patches.