The main sales pitch for robot lawnmowers like the Husqvarna Automower is that you don’t have to mow your grass, ever again. It always looks neat. But there’s a second claim: that trimming the grass just a tiny amount each day also results in healthier grass. Time for a direct comparison of the main lawn area maintained by the Automower, versus a patch of grass that I have been mowing manually.
The magic of the Automower is that you hardly ever need to care about it. You can leave it for weeks or months, and it’ll take care of itself. However, there is one piece of maintenance that you need to perform: blade replacement. It’s quite easy and only takes a few minutes, and all you need is a screwdriver.
I have a lot of fun making SuperHouse videos, but recently I’ve been thinking about ways that I can make them better. I have many ideas for different types of videos and a list of about 50 episodes I want to make in the future. Please have your say in the future of SuperHouse!
The Patreon page is at www.patreon.com/superhouse
Below is the original episode plan from the early concept for SuperHouse as a high-tech home renovation TV show. There were still some holes in it, but it gave us a rough outline for what we thought could be structured as a show something like a high-tech version of “This Old House”.
#4: Control from anywhere
The Husqvarna Automower has several built-in security features, to help reduce the risk of your expensive robot being stolen.
Bursts of bad weather keep flooding the bottom of our garden, so I need to “pause” the Automower. I can’t send commands to it directly (yet) so I need another solution. I’ve connected a Belkin WeMo WiFi power controller to the base station, so that I can use my phone to disable the mower without splashing around in the rain.
The Husqvarna Automower relies on a boundary wire to tell the mower when it needs to stop and turn around. This is *really* important if you have a drop-off in your garden, like I do at the moment! If the mower can’t detect the boundary, it could drive itself right over a tiny cliff, or into a pond, or something dangerous like that. So what happens if the power fails while the mower is operating, and the boundary wire stops working? Let’s try it and see what happens!
The second annual Society of Monash Electrical Engineers Robot Building Competition saw about 150 competitors spend a weekend building robots to solve a specific challenge. Their robots needed to follow a line down a track, detect when they approached a gate, sense the colour of the gate, transmit that colour to the course control computer using an RF transmitter module, wait for the gate to be opened, proceed to the next gate, and repeat until they reached the finish line. The finish line is a line across the track that matches the colour of the last gate, so they also had to detect multiple cross lines and ignore the ones that were the wrong colour.
The challenge turned out to be too complicated to complete within the time allowed, so it was simplified a little during the competition.
Freetronics was a major sponsor of the competition, providing prize packs for the first 4 place teams plus a bonus prize pack for a “best bling” category judged by me purely on who made the coolest looking robot.
New motion detectors for the Arduino / OpenHAB home automation system finally arrived! But before I test them I need a session with my therapist.
Sometimes you can’t just replace halogen globes with LED globes. This time I got lucky.
If I had a robot lawnmower, it would be trapped in either the front yard or the back yard. There’s no way for it to travel between them.
Or is there?
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