As summer scorches the northern hemisphere, here’s something to cool your thoughts: winter is only four months away. And with it will come the general misery and the proclamations that “It’ll never be warm again,” not to mention the white stuff and the shoveling. Or perhaps not, if you’re lucky enough to have a semi-autonomous electric snowblower in the garage.
The device [Dane Kouttron] describes is a strange beast indeed, and one that came to him under somewhat mysterious circumstances. It appears to be a standard Ariens two-stage blower, the kind normally driven by a fairly beefy internal combustion engine so as to have enough power to run the auger, the impeller, and the drive wheels. But a previous owner had removed the gas engine and attached a 4-kW brushless motor to run the auger and impeller. Realizing the potential of this machine and with a winter storm heading his way, [Dane] used the old engine mount to hold giant LiFePO₄ batteries from a cell tower backup battery, slapped a couple of electric wheelchair motors onto the drive wheels, mounted a motor to swivel the exhaust chute, and added control electronics from a retired battlebot. Setting such a machine loose in the wild would be bad, so an FPV system was added just in time for storm cleanup. Upgrades for version 2 include better weight distribution for improved stability and traction, and of course googly eyes. Check out the video below to see it flinging snow and moving around faster than any snowblower we’ve ever seen.
We’ll never get lucky enough to have such wonders gifted on us as [Dane] did, but we applaud him for picking up the torch where someone else obviously left off. And who knows; perhaps the previous maker took inspiration from this remote-controlled snowblower build?
I’m seeing a headline:
“Toddler killed by bizarre self-driving snowblower.”
naw. Maimed possibly, but the sheer bolts would break as it tried to chew through a femur. At least I think that’d be enough to do it. I’m not going to test.
And just how many people replace shear bolts with regular bolts after the 3rd replacement?
Although with Amazon/Ebay, it is easier to actually find/buy replacement shear pins these days.
I mean, who needs shear pins when you have thermal vision?
I keep a baggie with spare sheer bolts on a nail in the garage. ;-)
My John Deere 522 has holes in the control panel to thread a couple of spares.
I sheared the pins on mine with frozen dog poop once. Poop was frozen to the ground, thought it would be better to fling it into the woods before breakup, but didn’t work out that way.
Frozen cow pies wreak hell on ranch vehicles each winter.
But, they can provide traction on icy slopes!
The noise that thing makes, with those googly eyes would scare the crap out of my kids and have them running completely the opposite direction
When I noticed those eyes I instantly smiled, that it a fun addition to any machine.
Completely useless but so funny!
Those googly eyes need some angry looking eyebrows to scare anyone out of the way.
I agree, but I want googly eyes on my non-autonomous snowblower anyway!
Oh man, i could do servo actuated eyebrows! Are there ‘actually’ water resistant servos?
Oh yes.
I’m surprised it didn’t get repainted blue in the process.
Some pipe insulation for wiggly arms too, maybe a third wheel in the tadpole configuration for a tail to hide it.
Add a compass/magnetometer to the mix and you could do a course-correction to the speed command to the wheels to correct for drifting because of the slippery surfaces.
Are there plans for fully autonomous operation?
Then make it write messages or draw pictures in the snow
And so begins the robo-snowblower crop circles : ]
Followed by solar panels, autonomy…and finally sentience. At which point it will migrate south.
LOL!
I feel like the amount of steel in the structure would make that difficult; a moving-baseline DGPS might work better, and a gyro IMU for short-term jiggles would probably help even more. Sensor fusion is an exercise left to the reader… ;)
I WANT ONE!!!
Steering the discharge chute is always such a pain, especially if you’re trying to pile the snow in a specific area. Doubly so if you factor in wind.
I wonder if the Ardupilot codebase could help. It already has support for antenna gimbals and stuff, and keeping part of the craft pointed in specific orientations. Could you define a polygon and say “always point the chute somewhere in here”?
That’s just one step behind fully autonomous “fly a survey” mode that would have it do back-and-forth passes over the driveway of interest… ;)
Okay… at “fly a survey” I immediately thought “have a drone flying overhead reporting ‘you missed a spot. Are you going to get that?'”.
Just slap a webcam under the eaves of your garage with openCV looking for bare spots and pedestrians. Doubles as a security camera looking for package thieves. Maybe a nice heated housing to keep it from frosting over.
Shouldn’t be too hard. A rotary encoder to track position along your predefined driveway in polar coordinates to keep the chute pointed in a given arc.