It’s May, and you know what that means: we’re winding down from a worldwide celebration of the worker, pollen is everywhere, Hackaday readers in the southern hemisphere are somehow offended, and somewhere, someone is finishing up a remote-controlled snow blower build.
In this nine-part, two-hour-long video series, [Dave] covers the planning and fabrication of one of the most coveted of all cold weather yard instruments. It’s a remote-controlled snow blower. Just think: instead of bundling up to go blow the driveway off, [Dave] can get all the snow off his driveway from the comfort of his living room window. Sure, it may not sound like a big deal now that it’s Crocs & Socks weather, but this is going to be a great invention in seven or eight months.
This snow blower robot is built around two motors taken from an electric wheelchair. Most snowblowers already have tracks, so the ever-important traction for this build is already taken care of. A linear actuator takes care of the angle of the ‘scoop’, and a clever confabulation of bicycle sprockets, chain, and a motor allows the ‘chute’ of the snowblower to be pointed in any direction. The electronics are simple enough – a normal, off-the-shelf RC transmitter and receiver handles the wireless communication while an Arduino takes those signals and turns them into something the relays and motors understand.
This is one of the better build vlogs we’ve seen. There are nine parts to this build, we’ve included the final, wrapup video below.
I’ve been following this build since the beginning. Glad it got some exposure. It’s an interesting project voyage.
Love that Hackaday covered this. I am I doing a robo snow removal bot after having done a large size lawnmower. Hoping to do a multipurpose bot with a mower/blower/plow on the back. Lol. Canada eh. Gotta plan for it all here.
Nice build! Sadly, up in my neck of the woods, blowers are 8-12HP and have wheels and chains (for the ice on the driveway), and the snow is likely too deep for RC snowblower unless you blow it out every few inches. Also, there’s no way around the dense/heavy/massive plow mounds at the end of the driveway or the tall drifts requiring a human to seriously wrestle the snowblower through it. Perhaps RC blower plus explosive charges for the plow mounds & drifts? Maybe a magma based driveway heater? I need to move someplace warmer…
Look more like a job for a skid-steer excavator…
The one time we got two feet of snow here in NC, a tractor with a front end loader did a fine job! Everyone should have one. :)
Yeah, new englander here….I chuckled. Snow blowers are a tool that make the job faster – you still do a lot of wrangling. It’s something of a cross between using a garden tiller and a mower, particularly if anyone has walked or driven on the snow before you got to it, or it’s very deep, or like you said, the dreaded end-of-driveway plow mess. That said: adding a bunch of weight, and tweaking the scraper blade adjustment, would probably get you 90% there.
Uhh, they had the snow plows out on the roads here in Arizona the other day. So might not be too late after all! :-)
I want to know how many bags of ice he had to buy for the demo. :-)
Nice job!
A contender for BattleBots!
lol, by the looks of that snow shoot, he could blow the snow right over his fence into his neighbors yard. Looks like the neighbor has to accept the battle bot challenge and level up his snow robot.
Has to go into battle against a RC Zamboni.
That is a Nice build!
Did the donor blower come with helt drive, or whereabouts did he get Them?
Was looking for some like that just last Night in Europe for a robot build. Any info about where to find Them or what to search for is appreciated ☺️
Do you mean the rubber track drive? Sears (among others) made (make?) a snowblower with those.
If I could, I’d love to get a hold of a couple of those snowblowers for hacking into a snowgo.
As a “Florida Man”… What is Snow?
Hello from Minneapolis. This looks like a safe reliable way to run havoc on your neighbors from the comfort of your warm living room.
Hello Northerner! (from Owatonna)