Recently, we featured a way to use a manual lawn mower as a personal robot controlled remotely. Now, using a similar setup, anyone can hack an electric mower into a “mow the lawn” robot.
Three brothers (Doug, Dan and David Leonard) won with their “Google Mows My Lawn” project the Utah’s StartFEST Gigabit Hackathon presented by Google Fiber and DevMountain.
The three software engineers manage to hack a Ryobi electric lawn mower and convert it into a remote controlled robot. The designers use special wheels, a Raspberry Pi 2, two drills, batteries, and an eight channel relay board. The mobile lawn mower is controlled via smartphone with commands such as “w”,”a”,”s”,”d” for directional controls. Two iPods are attached to the robot to make sure that nothing is in the path of the machine.
The electric lawn mower was transformed into a personal robot in only one day. Because it was such a short time, the brothers still work to make some improvements to the device.
If you already have in your garage an electric lawn mower, the know-how and a little inclination on electronics and mechanics, you might be the next hacker and the person on the cutting edge in the gardening world. For more inspiration, the brothers have already shared the instructions on Instructables, so you can read the steps about how they did it.
Remote Control Autonomous Lawn Mower using RaspberryPi | Instructables
