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Comment by wcchandler | Hacker News Reader

This was a pitch of mine. Replace traditional lawn care with automated solutions. I would’ve distributed this to ~6 mowers. That was the easy part.

The hard part was making it look nice. The people that pay high prices for lawn care want it to look it a certain way. I couldn’t get over that hurdle.

I could but it would’ve been me driving over the already cut grass with specific grooming tools, and effectively negating any benefits of me over traditional labor.

I really think this tech is the future, and I’m glad there’s FOSS solutions to get hobbyists 90% of the way. The last 10% is going to be the real struggle for a startup.

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Wrong market. Make a model for farmers and rural citizens that don't care about the look of a rough cut. We just need to cut down a lot of grass regularly to prevent those areas from becoming a breeding ground for insects and rodents.

Then use your revenues to iterate on a version for people that want a lawn that looks like plastic.

Bingo, when I had two acres, I would have installed a shed for the thing to home in on and then let it run every other day. I had lots of problems with some weeds which if were nipped in the bud early, then I'd have a nice yard.

The only downside is that I'd need decent monitoring to alert me that I need to intervene before a serious mow is needed.

I'm the target demographic here. I have 5 acres of mostly non-wooded property. I just need it cut and don't care for striping or any of that. I was mowing with a zero turn with 48" deck. Last year we upgraded to a much bigger deck and the old 0turn sits idle. I wanted to tinker with it and do something similar to this to at least mow the "back 40" where there isn't much to navigate around.

Have you considered a low maintenance cover crop like no-mow grass or clover? They look like a good idea on paper, but are there side effects that are more trouble than the work of 'modern' lawn care?

All of my grass is native, not a cultivated lawn. I also have a lot of acreage, and a cover crop would be prohibitively expensive to prep and seed.

Even if you can establish a perennial crop, the native grass can still creep back in and outcompete it. And if it can keep the grass down, the cover crop necessarily will grow enough to create the aforementioned problems with pests. You still gotta mow it periodically to keep everything under control.

Good insight, thank you for sharing it. It didn't occur to me after I watched the OpenMower video.

A very small nitpick: OpenMower is not FOSS as it's restrictively licensed prohibiting commercial use (https://github.com/ClemensElflein/OpenMower/blob/main/LICENS...).

I don't understand this comment.

Autonomous lawn mowers are everywhere in my neighborhood, albeit being quite expensive. Some even have two for front and back.

Unless you have a very big yard or a very small yard it is quite literally "the thing to have" right now.

This is a huge market in central Europe.

Why not simply build the roller into the mower?

Then use an algorithm to get the stripes in the right places.

I have a gardener, and I can tell you that the mowing itself is the trivial bit. It's maybe 10% of lawn and garden work. If you want to automate the rest, it's not going to be possible unless we have something like the Tesla Bot.

You're not wrong, but there is definitely a niche for areas with much higher ratio of mowing to gardening work.

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