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.
Continue reading “Just In Time For Summer: A Remote Controlled Snowblower”
