I often wonder about this.

I think GPS is essential. Tie it to a location - if stolen, it won't operate. Then a way to text you if it is moved outside the designated area. Telling you where it is.

At that point, I suppose it would still be worth stealing just for the battery? A hard problem to solve.

In my case, my lawn isn't easily accessible and also not visible from the street (because the house and garage is between the street and the garden), and I trust my neighbors. So, I think (I hope) this isn't so much an issue for my case.

I think the eufy has also an optional GPS module just for this purpose, to better track it. I don't think this GPS module has any other purpose (e.g. it would not be used for navigation). But I didn't really checked the details on this.

I have seen this a few times for such robots, that you can buy an optional GPS module for tracking.

The sudden desire to add a small LLM and speech synthesizer so the mower can yell for help in a stranger danger scenario.

Third law of robotics: self protect!

I have seen such variants as well, where you actually need to install some antennas (RTK antennas?).

But that was already too much effort for me, so that's why I chose the eufy. Also, from reports that I have read, it doesn't necessarily work better with antennas. Actually, from reports that I have read, robots with camera-only had the least amount of reports where navigation was not properly working. At least that was my impression.

RTK GPS still struggles underneath heavy foliage. You still need a GPS signal. The OpenMower project has an accelerometer in it for dead reckoning, but it needs to get back to a GPS lock pretty quickly or it'll lose positional accuracy quite quickly.

Maybe 300 m^2 or so.

The eufy E15 is for up to 800 m^2. There is the eufy E18 for up to 1200 m^2.

I have seen other (more expensive, bigger) robots for much larger lawns.

My garden is relatively flat with a few bumps here and there.

You can also easily mark some areas of the lawn as always excluded so that it wont drive there.

The Mowgli project is reusing the mainboard of the original lawnmower (might be enhanced with a RPi though). It's not currently as well-baked (or at least, well-trodden) as the default OpenMower approach which does indeed involve ripping out the mainboard and replacing it.

Camera firmware:

https://thingino.com https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44791984

https://openipc.org https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44758463

NVR:

https://frigate.video https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44794508

> Is there anything comparable for security cameras?

ReoLink + Frigate.

[0] https://frigate.video/

I have a mix of older automowers (e.g. 315x) and newer bots like navimow x330.

The navimow does "mini stripes" and they do look nice, but the grass tends to look a little more "carpet" like with the automower randomized pattern.

Even better is to turn most of your lawn into natural landscape, leaving just the part you want to use for recreation as mowed.

It's a nice thought but the reality is that you'll be killing animals no matter what. I have a 48" riding mower and live in a rural area. At first I was really worried about all the field mice, voles, frogs, etc., that I saw running away from the mower. After a while, I realized that no matter how hard I tried, a certain number of them were just going to die. I tend to let my lawn grow fairly tall before cutting, and it's a mix of grasses, clovers, wildflowers and other plants that just grow naturally around here. The downside is that a lot of small animals live in it. I only remember running over one bunny so far, but who knows how many I might not have seen.

At least it's not fawns. Baby deer seem to be a magnet for combines harvesting corn.

Also to protect all those, animals and humans alike, who would like to enjoy a silent night.

I mean how fast do these mowers mow? I seriously doubt it's fast enough to run over an animal

They're certainly not endangered. They were "Least Concern" up until the last few years but have been reclassified as "Near Threatened" due to greenfield sites turned over to land development fragmenting their habitats. The most likely place a person will see them in 2025 is flattened on a road.

Domestic gardens make up an almost insignificant percentage of their natural habitat in any case, and any sort of HOA or Estate Management scenario would likely make it a violation to rewild a garden sufficient to create an amenable hedgehog habitat.

In short, its the responsibility of land utilised for agriculture - and this is recognised by measures around Europe such as the Eco-Scheme and ACRES (Agri-Climate Rural Environment Scheme) which indirectly support the re-establishment of hedgehog populations.

Hedgehogs ignore loud moving things going their direction ?

My dogs will eat them if they get hit. It's not a problem.

The thing is, they are more than a robot vacuum. They need to be able to:

- deal with rougher, bumpier terrain (friction!)

- do so uphill through uncut grass

- not stall the mowing motor with high grass

- cover a larger area

- be waterproof against rain

All of these points need a lot more power individually, and especially so when taken together (and carrying the weight increase of all those upgrades). It seems reasonable they'd cost at least twice as much for "similar" feature/budget levels. And I think that's pretty much what we're seeing.

I would love to hear more about this if you have information online anywhere.

I gave up on having an electric mower any time soon since I have a riding mower and a garden tractor that simply won't die. I really don't want to buy something new if I can keep repairing old stuff, no matter how annoying it gets.

However, I am interested in building an electric UTV in large part because it would be quieter than my Honda Foreman.

Do you have any links to your work?

No amount of things like grass mowers can add up to it.

You have to look at stuff people buy in large volume, like food, housing, energy, education, and health-care.

(By the way, I don't know if your figures are correct. I don't even know what country you are at.)

This is as much a complaint about high prices as the fact that Briggs & Stratton keeps making and selling an engine with an absolutely awful design.

If you want the boring details: it is a single cylinder 4 stroke motor. The first issue is that while it is dead simple, it does not have a modern way to control the RPM. These motors are meant to run at roughly 3600 RPM but at full throttle (how they are meant to be operated once in use) they will easily exceed that especially with no load such as in neutral. So they have a mechanical governor, which is also combined with an oil slinger (exactly what it sounds like: it is just a thing that slings oil all over the place hoping to get it onto the parts that need it). This contraption looks like this: https://www.lawnmowerpros.com/prodimages/691968.jpg. It is not very sturdy and is not very well mounted. It tends to break or even jam the gears between the crankshaft and the camshaft. This is bad because you don’t want loose pieces flying inside the bottom end of the motor.

In addition these motors have puny starters, so they have what’s called a compression release, which is a weight and a spring on the cam shaft. You can see it right by the gear here: https://www.briggsbits.co.uk/acatalog/84005207.3.jpeg

The idea is that at low RPM such as while you start the engine, the tiny spring will hold the weight to the shaft and the bump on it will keep the exhaust valve slightly open. This will mean you don’t get normal combustion but also it will be a lot easier to turn the engine over which is important for the puny starter. At higher RPM the weight will fly out and the other side with the bump will retract causing the exhaust valve to close fully when necessary.

The issue with this design is that the spring as you can see is tiny and thin and the weight is also pretty flimsy. They tend to break off and then you have a chunk of metal again.

Speaking of the camshaft, notice that the cam lobes are pressed onto the camshaft, not cut out of a single piece of steel. This is cheap but tends to be very sloppy. These motors don’t run very well.

And lastly, while these motors have a (tiny) oil pump and it is properly driven by the camshaft, the part that drives the oil pump is actually a separate piece of shaft that just slots into the main shaft of the camshaft. You can see it here as the short shaft with two flat parts on either end: https://www.lsengineers.co.uk/media/catalog/product/cache/21...

This means the camshaft isn’t even straight necessarily but is gear driven which requires more precision than chain, not less.

This is before we get into just basics like the fact that none of them have proper head/cylinder mating surfaces so they blow head gaskets like crazy, or their very loose rockers that go out of spec all the time causing it to run very poorly and needing constant adjustment. This is the same exact engine in every smaller riding mower on the market today. If you don’t get this one, you will get a much worse Kohler equivalent.

An equivalent Honda engine I could swap into my mower would cost me $2,000 for a refurb. Harbor Freight used to sell a motor for this for $800 but discontented it a few years ago. Basically, the entire market segment is shit. Greenworks and Ryobi have the electric mowers for about $5,000 that don’t seem to have these issues but batteries don’t have nearly the energy density than the two gallon of gas which is what it takes to run a normal mower for an hour.

If the poster is in the USA couldn't it be explained by Trump Tariffs (in addition to inflation)

I made it for my country home and won’t be there for a bit but maybe one day I’ll document it. But the parts store I used closed down, Open Builds Part Store. It’s nothing proprietary to them, I just got all the v slot aluminum frame and connectors there to build the chassis. Then I got hub motor wheels on Amazon or Aliexpress and batteries too. Most small components I get on Amazon, motor controller. I went with off-road air filled tires. And I wrote all then logic into an arduino mega. Oh and I used an upside down rubber made container as the case for electronics. Everything is mounted to the bottom of the lid and the box part is functionally the lid that I remove to gain access. It as built in snap locks and I used weather stripping to make the seal tight.

You just have to figure out how to mount to the lawn mower part of your choice, after than it’s the same as building any vehicle.

It does not have obstacle avoidance, the best it has is recognizing it keeps getting stuck and skipping the next goal until it finds a goal it can reach. This can often look like obstacle avoidance since the next goal might be in a slightly different direction and so it will be able to continue. This is aided by a new feature that I added which will make the mower back up first when it gets stuck before continuing.

However, I should note that it's a hackable ROS system, so people have added obstacle detection with various sensors on their mowers. There is just not official support or a standard way to do it.

I've mowed with it this summer and last summer, and there hasn't been downtime at much as repeatedly getting stuck and requiring me to bring it back to the dock (although less and less). But my lawn is probably the hardest lawn any Openmower mows, as I mentioned in a cousin comment.

The yardforce500 is hard to find in the USA, but it's extremely cheap in Europe. I found a great deal and paid $208 for the mower and $135 for a package forwarder to ship it from Germany. I have a complete spreadsheet of my expenses here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BV8VCtqTer8iodXvyRd1...

It's hard to put a specific number on it, since it's been progressively improving the whole time I had it. I bought it in the fall of 2023, and got it "running" then, but it was not actually doing any useful work. Summer of 2024 it was doing useful work but required constant hand holding and a series of hardware and software upgrades to get it more stable. This year it is actually doing the majority of the mowing. It still requires frequent rescue but it's a lot less work than actually mowing the lawn myself.

However my lawn is probably the most difficult lawn of any openmower user. I'm in Vermont, so I have very steep terrain, a bumpy yard, poor GPS reception, very wet weather, and also my lawn is very large and complex shaped. For a simple use case it would be working great a long time ago. I also chose to do a "Mowgli" build which is based on more reverse engineering, which added complexity and unreliability (but saved some money).

The GPLv3 does allow profiting off his work though, so that might not be the best choice of license. Especially since hardware vendors often deliberately don't comply with the GPL, and the only recourse is an expensive lawsuit.

Well scythes are a typical way to cut grass, and they are basically just swinging a blade to do it - they just use a long handle to make it easy to move the blade fast enough.

https://m.youtube.com/results?search_query=scythe+grass+cut

(I've no idea about the physics of required speed or blade sharpness, so don't know how feasible or not a robot cutting this way would be.)

I am imagining razor blades arranged like Vs. They don’t necessarily have to cut horizontally either. Cutting upwards would exploit the tension of the roots rather than overcoming the inertia mass of a blade of grass.

Turtle bots.

I have one of the best looking lawns in my neighborhood. I cut it whenever is most convenient for me. That might be any time between 9AM and 7PM. I cut it no matter the outside temperature. The only thing I avoid doing is cutting it while wet.

I’m not sure what your criteria is, but mine is to keep the grass alive and provide root structure for my soil.

Ender’s Game for lawnmowers

Unexpected bcantrill.

Mowagotchi!

That's only an option in areas where the township will allow it.

Big reason to cut the grass is to keep pests away from the house.

That said, I rather consciously arrange deadfall along one steep bank between our house and that of a neighbor so as to encourage/foster lightning bug egg laying/larvae/pupae.

„biodiversity“ as in a mix of roads, gutters and cars. There was a suggestion of introducing some footpaths to the mix but there was concern it was too much diversity.

a lot of folks don't understand permaculture when they first dive into it and end up in a bad situation. cultivating a pleasing ecosystem is both complicated a lot of work to get right, but eventually it can mostly take care of itself. sadly, traditional gardening doesn't really teach you how to maintain plants in concert or how to passively repel pests. it can be pretty rewarding to learn though if you don't mind getting into the science of it.

I kinda think "open" is a word that's immediately undermined by any qualification.

I'm really down for more variety with licenses like this one, but "open source" has become really unhelpful because it's used for:

- Open source for half the code, and the other half is proprietary

- Open source as long as you aren't a company

- Open source as long as you aren't a company competing with us

It's helpful to have a term for "free to do whatever you want with", but we don't really have on that doesn't get misused elsewhere right now.

You don't like open source but want to ride off its good name so you're co-opting the term to mean something else. We already have a widely accepted term for this type of license - "source available".

It's simply not open source. It doesn't meet the definition.

It's co-opting the term to call it open source.

This has been debated and settled. What people mean by open source or free software has a well agreed upon definition, and this isn't it.

> Or WP Engine, which basically lifted WordPress wholesale and gives absolutely nothing back.

I understand (tho not agree with you) up until this point. Don’t forget Wordpress was not originally Wordpress, you would say they “basically lifted b2/cafepress wholesale and gave nothing back”. Wordpress wouldn’t exist otherwise.

But OpenSource has a special meaning.

Just give it another name that doesn’t imply wrong assumption what can and can’t do with it.

> I'm sick of open source purism.

> Open source purism - especially for non-viral MIT and BSD licenses - is how Google and Microsoft and Amazon stole from the commons and turned it against us.

So why don't you advocate for Free Software which has always worked in the interest of the commons and provided the GPL as a way to combat this, instead of something else that isn't free and restricts the freedom of users more than a weak license?

> I 100% commend CC-BY-SA-NC and other fair source licenses. These are sustainable efforts.

Funnily enough, the CC BY-SA-NC is not a fair source license, as it doesn’t include a provision for delayed open source publication. It is quite important, actually:

> DOSP ensures that if a Fair Source company goes out of business, or develops its products in an undesired direction, the community or another company can pick up and move forward. Will this be meaningful in practice? Again, time will tell. – https://fair.io/about/

But I do agree with the sentiment otherwise.

I'm on the scythe team, it's quite relaxing and a good workout, 0 noise, almost no insect/animals killed. Sure it's slow, but you can skip the gym for a few days after mowing, it hits my abs harder than 200kg dealifts or a day of rock climbing. < $100 for a top of the line that will serve you, your kids and their kids

Another reel mower user here. But our, uh, lawn, I guess you'd call it, has maybe 300 sq. ft of grass. Well, mostly grass. There's other stuff in there that I'm pretty sure is not grass? Come to think of it, 'mostly' grass at this point is a bit of an exaggeration. Also, in the spring violets. Which I leave for the bees until June. Rabbits come and help out too.

Reel mowers are also nicer for allergy sufferers - no dust etc thrown up in the air, no gasoline exhaust. Not to mention fairly quiet.

Obvious downsides are can't cope with some species (too low to ground, etc) or with sticks etc if near a wooded area.

I made another comment about it but consider adding a drivetrain. My v1 was RC but then I added lidar when I got tired of driving it by controller.

LOL. I remember the day I phoned my dad and told him he didn't need to send me checks anymore (I was a student in college). Our relationship shifted overnight - he then treated me as a man rather than as a child.