Anything having lots of rpm ain't silent. Especially not at night.
So they surely ain't as loud as a combustion lawn mower and are pretty silent in comparison, so maybe you won't notice them in the city with its background noise. But in rural areas I perceive them as noisy even on daylight with normal noise level. And I never saw anyone using them at night - for a reason.
And as for gp .. he is already shadowbanned and you likely cannot see his answer (I have showdead=true). He reacted poorly I think.
Yeah, in that case, this sounds like a horrific idea.
I could hear a neighbours smoke alarm beeping periodically due to low battery the other night and went around to replace the battery for them the next day.
Also, I wasn't aware of the showdead setting (and had no idea about the answer that had been hidden), thanks for the tip.
The wildlife (like hedgehogs) will feel very audited when they get sliced up by a razorblade, run over, and can barely drag themselves off your lawn to bleed out throughout hours of pain. If they don't bleed out, they often end up mutilated, unable to properly eat, walk, etc.
Nice wildlife auditing. Hedgehogs are endangered in lots of areas of the world. Run your robot lawnmower during the day.
If you don't like that mental image, you should feel for the people working at hedgehog rescues
The price still needs to come down for what is effectively a slightly more rugged robot vaccuum. I could buy a used car for that, and have enough left over to make it run reliably.
The quality of cheaper models is not great. I bought two from Einhell (power tool brand like DeWalt in Europe) and they both had to be returned due to motor failures. A replacement motor was €150 - for a €400 robot without battery (it uses their 18V tool batteries which is what appealed to me - easy replacement).
My father just picked up a Husqvarna 430x to do his yard, and it's a pretty great piece of equipment. It runs basically around the clock and handles his acre on a hillside with relative ease... It finds a couple of the garden beds a bit tricky to navigate, but that'll be a software issue that likely improves as time goes on.
I’ve been watching the “Lymow One” with great interest because it appears a lot more rugged and it uses actual mower-style blades rather than the rotating-disc-and-razors model. Also claims to be able to take care of 1.7 acres, which is about spot on what I need.
It’s still pretty new though, and it's a kickstarter from a new company so not much trust yet.
I was hoping this was more of a hardware project as in building the physical mower from scratch. I am not quite sold on the robotic mowers but the quality and market for riding mowers is insane right now. I own two riding mowers and both are completely dead. One needs a rather expensive wiring harness so they it would stop catching fire when it runs. The other has the most common single cylinder engine that comes in all the mowers in the past like 30 years and it’s a terrible design that grenades itself 1-4 times a year. And the prices of these new and used are out of this world even compared to baseline inflation.
I decided to strip one of them and convert it to full electric using salvaged electric motors from Ryobi mowers and Amazon controllers. I have seen a few videos of this conversion and I do like the logic of having one motor for the drive wheels and one per blade rather than messing with fancy belts and pulleys and idlers and clutches. A really interesting part of this kind of build is that I can reuse Ryobi’s 40V batteries so I don’t need to design and build a custom battery + BMS + charging system. Just buy and wire enough connectors to run everything.
And that’s where it would be really cool to see a properly engineered project around doing something like that. I see a lot of potential here since you can get these motors for roughly $50 shipped on eBay and a controller would be about as much.
The hardware+software used to both be under that same non commercial cc license, but there was recently a relicense of the software to GPL3. I think the goal is to just prevent someone else from profiting off of Clemens's work without him (while still allowing community use).
Agreed, the Mammotion hardware is amazing - the app is horrible. An open API would solve this as well, but there's little chance with the Chinese owners.
When I read the title I remembered how people in the 90s at my place built their lawn mowers. It was a new thing. My father welded the frame from scrap metal with the motor from a washing machine and some tiny wheels from an old baby stroller lol. It was kind of open source, many people copied or he helped build one. Haha, served us surprisingly well for a time :)
This is a fun project to take on. Couple years ago I built an autonomous controlled chassis onto a push reel mower (removed handles of course). It’s not as safe as the typical robot mower given they use tiny blades to trim (and reel mower will take a finger) but it’s relatively low maintenance since the blades need replacing every month or so. I opted for lidar as the reviews on RTK GPS seem pretty hit or miss and didn’t want the base antenna thingy. It works well for me and the cut quality is amazing even just running once a week.
I used to research autonomous vehicles long time ago. You'd be surprised how difficult it is to do a true random walk in a real physical environment due to all the inherent physical bias and implicit steering that results from the terrain.
I run an Open mower on my 1400 square meter lawn in the USA. AMA. (ps. If you are interested make sure to go to the discord instead of just reading the docs or GitHub pages -- that is where all the activity is!)
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).
I have been dreaming of small solar robots that quietly trim the grass all day. Static blades pulled across the grass in short bursts. RC orchestration guided by security cameras.
Wouldn't the small solar robot have to move pretty fast in order for the blade to be able to cut through grass? I can't imagine cutting grass very effectively by just (manually) dragging a knife through it, it will just bend out of the way instead of cut won't it?
There are a number of supported mowers now, including ones sold in the USA, and the number will increase with the upcoming V2 board! Really all the activity is on the discord server -- the GitHub projects are secondary so it can seem much less active (and information is less up to date) if you look there
Lawn mowing seems like such a useless thing. I mean domestic lawns themselves, especially in a crisis of biodiversity loss, are such a waste of possibility. I had to stop the video when I saw the mower was going for a patch of clovers, thus reducing plant diversity to a single boring, useless species
Indeed. Sure, lawns do have their place, like for playing sports or for kids to play around. But otherwise, what a waste. Just plant some local flowers or whatever and have a meadow.
As an example, at some point my father stopped bothering to mow his lawn all the time (basically only once per year). It's now a nice meadow with all kinds of grasses. Frogs, butterflies, dragonflies, bees like it.
An additional issue with robotic mowers is that they tend to kill hedgehogs.
„biodiversity“ as in „just let the place rot and get covered by weeds until trees and over stuff planted by you collapse due to the massive-and-aggressiveness of pests and pesty weeds.
„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.
My solution has been even simpler --- I just use a reel mower (on an admittedly small lawn, ~1/3rd of an acre) --- it's a decent workout, esp. when I strive to finish quickly.
(the one time I asked my son to cut the grass he broke the reel mower)
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 worth noting that the project is CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0 however it comes with a notice that other licenses are available if you content them directly. So it may not be open source under the strict definition however the project is also not staunchly anti-commercial.
> Feel free to use the design in your private/educational projects, but don't try to sell the design or products based on it without getting my consent first. The idea here is to share knowledge, not to enable others to simply sell my work. Thank you for understanding.
Open source has been turned against us and used to build hyperscalers that effectively control modern computing.
Pure open source is also not a sustainable business model. You have to be open core or non-commercial, otherwise anyone and everyone can steal your lunch.
You're asking for the right to compete when they've given you every other single right there is. That's just not nice.
> Open source has been turned against us and used to build hyperscalers that effectively control modern computing.
> Pure open source is also not a sustainable business model. You have to be open core or non-commercial, otherwise anyone and everyone can steal your lunch.
Maybe, but beside the point. The point is "don't call whatever you're doing open source if it isn't open source (per the generally accepted definition which you can read e.g. at https://opensourcedefinition.org/ )". No moral judgement here whether open source is morally superior or not, or whether open source is for suckers because the hyperscalers will co-opt it, or whatever. If you don't want to do open source, then don't, but don't go and call it open source.
> 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.
> 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/
> 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?
Because before your know it your very much open source company called Prusa will end up being competed with by subsidized stuff from the east based on your own work.
Ideally, yes, but ideals go out the window when your direct competitor is being unfairly subsidized, selling their products at a loss to steal your lunch and you realize that your continued good will on the software side will be the end of your existence.
So is this like Valetudo[0] but for mowers? Very cool! I wonder how much overlap / shared code there is between robot vacuums and robot mowers.
[0]: https://valetudo.cloud/
Thanks for mentioning this. I did not know it existed, and it looks very interesting. I might try to "upgrade" my 7-year-old vacuum robot.
Here's what robotic mowers blades look like to understand how they work - https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/676d76e61268a4...
We just got a Sunseeker X7 to do ~4 acres of grassed area but probably ~2 acres will be garden beds and roads etc
The hardware is there, it's all software now.
People talk about updates and the robot improved amazingly, comments like - "these scuffs are from pre-update"
These are Elon's updateable cars, they will get better with time. (Sunseeker is also camera not yet LiDAR)
Robotic mowers are better than humans, there are a few if's and buts, grass nerds compare the cuts on a grass blade on YouTube for instance.
With a robot you can set blade lengths for areas and be seasonal/weather orientated. The constant cuttings mean the nutrients get shredded back in.
The Chinese seem to be the best... but that might have been my price bracket.
Obviously since you can run them at night at 3am you quickly see other uses like security/wildlife auditing. Exciting times to live in.
Please don't run them at night to protect animals like hedgehogs and others that are active at night.
Also to protect all those, animals and humans alike, who would like to enjoy a silent night.
I'm assuming (perhaps unreasonably?) that given the suggestion you could run it at night, that it's silent, or near silent?
If that's not the case, GP must be a madman.
Anything having lots of rpm ain't silent. Especially not at night.
So they surely ain't as loud as a combustion lawn mower and are pretty silent in comparison, so maybe you won't notice them in the city with its background noise. But in rural areas I perceive them as noisy even on daylight with normal noise level. And I never saw anyone using them at night - for a reason.
And as for gp .. he is already shadowbanned and you likely cannot see his answer (I have showdead=true). He reacted poorly I think.
Yeah, in that case, this sounds like a horrific idea.
I could hear a neighbours smoke alarm beeping periodically due to low battery the other night and went around to replace the battery for them the next day.
Also, I wasn't aware of the showdead setting (and had no idea about the answer that had been hidden), thanks for the tip.
Must depend on the model. I can't hear mine from more than 10 meters away.
At night?
I doubt that. At daylight with normal background noise level, possible.
[dead]
The wildlife (like hedgehogs) will feel very audited when they get sliced up by a razorblade, run over, and can barely drag themselves off your lawn to bleed out throughout hours of pain. If they don't bleed out, they often end up mutilated, unable to properly eat, walk, etc.
Nice wildlife auditing. Hedgehogs are endangered in lots of areas of the world. Run your robot lawnmower during the day.
If you don't like that mental image, you should feel for the people working at hedgehog rescues
The price still needs to come down for what is effectively a slightly more rugged robot vaccuum. I could buy a used car for that, and have enough left over to make it run reliably.
The quality of cheaper models is not great. I bought two from Einhell (power tool brand like DeWalt in Europe) and they both had to be returned due to motor failures. A replacement motor was €150 - for a €400 robot without battery (it uses their 18V tool batteries which is what appealed to me - easy replacement).
My father just picked up a Husqvarna 430x to do his yard, and it's a pretty great piece of equipment. It runs basically around the clock and handles his acre on a hillside with relative ease... It finds a couple of the garden beds a bit tricky to navigate, but that'll be a software issue that likely improves as time goes on.
I’ve been watching the “Lymow One” with great interest because it appears a lot more rugged and it uses actual mower-style blades rather than the rotating-disc-and-razors model. Also claims to be able to take care of 1.7 acres, which is about spot on what I need.
It’s still pretty new though, and it's a kickstarter from a new company so not much trust yet.
I was hoping this was more of a hardware project as in building the physical mower from scratch. I am not quite sold on the robotic mowers but the quality and market for riding mowers is insane right now. I own two riding mowers and both are completely dead. One needs a rather expensive wiring harness so they it would stop catching fire when it runs. The other has the most common single cylinder engine that comes in all the mowers in the past like 30 years and it’s a terrible design that grenades itself 1-4 times a year. And the prices of these new and used are out of this world even compared to baseline inflation.
I decided to strip one of them and convert it to full electric using salvaged electric motors from Ryobi mowers and Amazon controllers. I have seen a few videos of this conversion and I do like the logic of having one motor for the drive wheels and one per blade rather than messing with fancy belts and pulleys and idlers and clutches. A really interesting part of this kind of build is that I can reuse Ryobi’s 40V batteries so I don’t need to design and build a custom battery + BMS + charging system. Just buy and wire enough connectors to run everything.
And that’s where it would be really cool to see a properly engineered project around doing something like that. I see a lot of potential here since you can get these motors for roughly $50 shipped on eBay and a controller would be about as much.
[dead]
CC-BY-SA 4.0 is an interesting choice. I know this isn't a ShowHN, but was this chosen because it's copyleft, but hardware?
The hardware+software used to both be under that same non commercial cc license, but there was recently a relicense of the software to GPL3. I think the goal is to just prevent someone else from profiting off of Clemens's work without him (while still allowing community use).
I wonder how these guys know how install the new os or bypass the os that come with the bot
>I'm on the lookout for new challenges.
Please mod your mower to automatically pick up litter along road edges, and sell it to Caltrans at dot.ca.gov
I dream of a day when my Mammotion Luba gets some decent working software. The HW is stellar, the SF is EXTREMELY bad :/
Agreed, the Mammotion hardware is amazing - the app is horrible. An open API would solve this as well, but there's little chance with the Chinese owners.
[dead]
When I read the title I remembered how people in the 90s at my place built their lawn mowers. It was a new thing. My father welded the frame from scrap metal with the motor from a washing machine and some tiny wheels from an old baby stroller lol. It was kind of open source, many people copied or he helped build one. Haha, served us surprisingly well for a time :)
My uncle used a semi-DIY lawn mower for many years where he had replaced the original broken engine with an old electric drill. Worked fine enough.
This is a fun project to take on. Couple years ago I built an autonomous controlled chassis onto a push reel mower (removed handles of course). It’s not as safe as the typical robot mower given they use tiny blades to trim (and reel mower will take a finger) but it’s relatively low maintenance since the blades need replacing every month or so. I opted for lidar as the reviews on RTK GPS seem pretty hit or miss and didn’t want the base antenna thingy. It works well for me and the cut quality is amazing even just running once a week.
I used to research autonomous vehicles long time ago. You'd be surprised how difficult it is to do a true random walk in a real physical environment due to all the inherent physical bias and implicit steering that results from the terrain.
So this includes a CC licensed RTK base and remote? That's pretty cool.
I run an Open mower on my 1400 square meter lawn in the USA. AMA. (ps. If you are interested make sure to go to the discord instead of just reading the docs or GitHub pages -- that is where all the activity is!)
Nice!
How much time did it take you from the moment you started the project to the point where it fell like it was up & running?
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).
I have been dreaming of small solar robots that quietly trim the grass all day. Static blades pulled across the grass in short bursts. RC orchestration guided by security cameras.
Wouldn't the small solar robot have to move pretty fast in order for the blade to be able to cut through grass? I can't imagine cutting grass very effectively by just (manually) dragging a knife through it, it will just bend out of the way instead of cut won't it?
Goat?
Turtle bots.
If that is your dream, then have you considered replacing grass with turf? No growth to worry about!
You cannot just trim grass all day unless you want a terrible lawn. You need to cut at the right hours.
I’m not sure what your criteria is, but mine is to keep the grass alive and provide root structure for my soil.
Aesthetics matter.
This is really neat, but it seems like the one supported mower isn't officially available in North America.
Has anyone here made this project work with a mower that's easily available here?
There are a number of supported mowers now, including ones sold in the USA, and the number will increase with the upcoming V2 board! Really all the activity is on the discord server -- the GitHub projects are secondary so it can seem much less active (and information is less up to date) if you look there
I had posted this several years back trying to figure out options in NA without much luck: https://github.com/ClemensElflein/OpenMower/issues/8
Sounds like the hardware platform isn't available anywhere at all now.
Some titles I upvote without first following the link.
Two discussions about Larry Ellison battling it out for 14th and 15th place:
14. An IRC-Enabled Lawn Mower (idlerpg.net)
15. OpenMower – An Open Source Lawn Mower (github.com/clemenselflein)
You wouldn't anthropomorphize a lawn mower would you?
Unexpected bcantrill.
this is cool
Lawn mowing seems like such a useless thing. I mean domestic lawns themselves, especially in a crisis of biodiversity loss, are such a waste of possibility. I had to stop the video when I saw the mower was going for a patch of clovers, thus reducing plant diversity to a single boring, useless species
Indeed. Sure, lawns do have their place, like for playing sports or for kids to play around. But otherwise, what a waste. Just plant some local flowers or whatever and have a meadow.
As an example, at some point my father stopped bothering to mow his lawn all the time (basically only once per year). It's now a nice meadow with all kinds of grasses. Frogs, butterflies, dragonflies, bees like it.
An additional issue with robotic mowers is that they tend to kill hedgehogs.
„biodiversity“ as in „just let the place rot and get covered by weeds until trees and over stuff planted by you collapse due to the massive-and-aggressiveness of pests and pesty weeds.
„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.
My dad's solution was simple: "Mow the lawn!" directed at me.
My solution has been even simpler --- I just use a reel mower (on an admittedly small lawn, ~1/3rd of an acre) --- it's a decent workout, esp. when I strive to finish quickly.
(the one time I asked my son to cut the grass he broke the reel mower)
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.
That's why I moved out.
[flagged]
It's open source to people and organizations who are not assholes and thieves.
I don't care about my fake internet points, so have at 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 worth noting that the project is CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0 however it comes with a notice that other licenses are available if you content them directly. So it may not be open source under the strict definition however the project is also not staunchly anti-commercial.
> Feel free to use the design in your private/educational projects, but don't try to sell the design or products based on it without getting my consent first. The idea here is to share knowledge, not to enable others to simply sell my work. Thank you for understanding.
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.
Open source has been turned against us and used to build hyperscalers that effectively control modern computing.
Pure open source is also not a sustainable business model. You have to be open core or non-commercial, otherwise anyone and everyone can steal your lunch.
You're asking for the right to compete when they've given you every other single right there is. That's just not nice.
> Open source has been turned against us and used to build hyperscalers that effectively control modern computing.
> Pure open source is also not a sustainable business model. You have to be open core or non-commercial, otherwise anyone and everyone can steal your lunch.
Maybe, but beside the point. The point is "don't call whatever you're doing open source if it isn't open source (per the generally accepted definition which you can read e.g. at https://opensourcedefinition.org/ )". No moral judgement here whether open source is morally superior or not, or whether open source is for suckers because the hyperscalers will co-opt it, or whatever. If you don't want to do open source, then don't, but don't go and call it open source.
[flagged]
> 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.
> 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.
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?
Because before your know it your very much open source company called Prusa will end up being competed with by subsidized stuff from the east based on your own work.
I don't belive in "open source", I believe in free software.
So what? They make something better, so I take what they did and improve my product.
It's not my problem if someone from the Big Red East does something with my work as long as they share it too.
Ideally, yes, but ideals go out the window when your direct competitor is being unfairly subsidized, selling their products at a loss to steal your lunch and you realize that your continued good will on the software side will be the end of your existence.
Very cool project, but CC-BY-NC-SA is "source available", not opensource :-(
Looks like the software project ( https://github.com/ClemensElflein/open_mower_ros ) uses GPL-3.0.