Hacker News Reader

Comment by xxs | Hacker News Reader

Alternatively get a robot mower - does the job better, takes even less space and effectively requires no work/maintenance, aside replacing the blades every few months.

View on HN

Robot mowers frighten me. It's one thing to have a vacuum cleaner blindly stumble around - there's only so much damage it can do. But whirling blades up the lethality stakes a lot. The navigational and object-avoidance prowess of Roombas do not convince me that arming them with samurai swords is wise.

and removing the dead hedgehogs from the yard.

https://www.wired.com/story/robot-lawnmowers-are-killing-hed...

This is such an odd article. What about a robotic lawnmower leads to hedgehog death that is different than a human powered one?

I didn't read the article, but I'm guessing humans are better at spotting the hedgehogs?

>better at spotting the hedgehogs

At night, dusk? Hedgehogs are nocturnal.

That would explain dead hedgehogs as most of these autonomous mowers operate at night.

Yeah, might do that eventually. At the moment I kind of enjoy mowing the lawn. I listen to a podcast or audiobook, give my brain a break.. Also will pick weeds and such as I go, which the robot can't.

Are there any that work like robot vacuums? I mean NO funny cables around a garden that show robot a no go zone? I want robot to build a map of garden just like Roborocks.

I have had ideas to build a GPS based prototype on my own as a hobby project (both the hardware and software)... other than that I don't know of commercially viable ones.

However, in practice the cables are no issue - you can have them installed and dug in the soil rather trivially (the cable is shot in). Once done - you'd never notice them ever again. No go zone can be organized with magnetic strips (also buried).

Roomba was developing a system without a boundary wire at some point, but it doesn’t look like they ended up shipping it.

Not sure why nobody else is working on it. Could it be that the ToF sensors in indoor robot vacuums are just not powerful enough to operate in sunlight?

Maybe it’s because the boundary wire installation is a matter of minutes and only needs to be done once?

The boundary wire was not a matter of minutes for me - far from it, more like half a day - but that's because I wanted to bury it out of sight.

I guess they still rely on boundary wire because it's very reliable - you don't want a couple unlucky GPS readings to cause your robot mower, armed with very real spinning blades, to end up in the neighbor's yard or on the street and hurt somebody.

I made the same mistake the first time as well, took forever to get it installed underground by hand. The second time I paid like 100 euros for the full-service package where they showed up with a cable-laying machine and it literally took the guy more time to unload the machine from the van than it took him to circle the property and lay the cable.

The bigger headache with boundary cables is finding and fixing any cuts that might happen when doing unrelated yardwork.

>finding and fixing any cuts that might happen when doing unrelated yardwork

this is also easy if you have decent electronics equipment... or it's built in the mower, itself, where you can select to follow the line till the break.

>far from it, more like half a day - but that's because I wanted to bury it out of sight.

>>dug in the soil rather trivially (the cable is shot in)

From my previous comment. Look for "Cable Laying Machine" rent; it's around 60euro/day here.

> Maybe it’s because the boundary wire installation is a matter of minutes and only needs to be done once?

Yeah, unless you have a dog that wants to dig stuff up.

Who empties the grass box?

it's discharged on the lawn, itself, obviously. No box. Since it's everydays jobs the cuts are really short. The lack of external discharge is better for the lawn.

You shouldn't have one. The grass breaks down if you have your grass mowed to a proper height. Your lawn won't look like a golf course though. which is a good thing, golf courses are an environmental disaster.

Unless, of course, you live in an HOA which requires you to not leave your clippings on the lawn. If only there was a place round here where there wasn't an HOA!

There are no clippings in the way they mean.

The robomover cuts the lawn so often so there is just a fine mulch that disappears below the lawn (and fertilizes it).

I have heard stories about your rabid HOA, but they can't have a problem with that?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com