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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io

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Full local/open source lawnmower? (lemm.ee)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Anyone have any current recommendations for an open source (or one that works without internet) robot lawnmower?

I've got 1,300m3 of grass around my house and it's been a pain to cut with a push mower.

So far I've only seen:

My issue with the openmower one is that I don't know how to solder and I'm too afraid I'll break some very expensive components, so it would be nice if I could buy something mostly pre-built.

As for repalmaker, I worry not having GPS won't work since my garden is quite large and a robot bouncing around randomly would probably never finish, I also have a separate front and back (there's a path between them) and I'd like the robot to finish one area then, go to the other area by itself.

Anyone seen any other options available?

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Some more projects here: https://hackaday.com/blog/?s=lawnmower

Maybe skip the first one (running DooM on your lawnmower), I don't think that will help.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago

Speak for yourself. I need my lawn mower angry enough to cut down trees.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Torn. This is clearly a cool idea, and it would save a lot of work (which I would immediately offset with all the work putting it together) But then it will be that much easier to keep a traditional lawn going, which I'd love to get away from over the long term.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

That's a great point I didn't even think about. It would be a lot of work up front but it would be much cheaper and less maintenance for me to dig up the grass and plant native plants like clover.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Of course don't let me dissuade you. My wife would much prefer a robo mower with "normal" lawn over a no-lawn solution

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

The biggest hurdle I've ran into is that GPS resolution just isn't accurate enough. If you want something that can follow a planned route without having to rely on a bunch of obstacle avoidance (which is difficult enough in itself) then you'll have to set up some sort of local RTK in conjunction with the GPS.

Currently I'm just setting my mower up like a FPV drone that I can drive around remotely from the comfort of air conditioning. Hoping someone comes out with a good automated solution.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Ardumower is the one I've always intended to roll with. Eventually lol. The original nav method is a buried perimeter wire, but they do offer a GPS-RTK kit.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

You can root the Gardena gateway and control their mowers locally with this: https://github.com/andrexp/gardena-local-control

I don't think they have mowers with GPS though. Also, some of their mowers don't use the gateway.