Heres a video of it moving forward, then backwards (sort of) with commands sent from the iPhone interface. It looks like we have a few bugs to work out.
We did our first test today. It moved… in a circle!
… after we told it to go forward.
During an attempt to change some programming, we realized that the actuator pulled more amperage when actually on the mower.. and melted some wiring =)
Anyway i think its all fixed now.. We will try and get some video up tomorrow.
Check out the gallery for pictures of it mounted.
The gMow Enclosure is pretty much done. =).
We used two plastic containers from wal-mart to hold everything =P.
Click any picture below to see the gallery.
We decided that we would first try and control the Mower remotely before we try and make it mow the yard by its self.
What better way to control it then with an iPhone?
We redid the test run of the hardware in daylight to better show everything working. Enjoy.
EDIT: Alot of people that have been directed to the site and just watched the video have said “Oh cool, a go cart made out of lawn mower parts!”. Im guessing this is because we have the cutting deck off of it during testing. If you dont quite understand what gMow is, feel free to fallow the link at the top of this page.
gMow’s hardware is just about 100% complete. There will probably be changes along the way, but its functional!
The next thing to do is to get our microprocessor to control the gMow insted of 2 switches, because at the moment all we really have is a hard to drive, lazy mans Zero-Turn =)
Here is a video of us controlling the hardware via 2 switches (1 actuator per switch) to drive the gMower ourselves.
EDIT: The video is terrible, i know. I didn’t take into account YouTube shrinking my text, stupid me. (Cant really blame me, im new to making videos =P) .
What the text at the end was basically saying was to stay tuned for updates, as we should have the gMow doings something without human interface soon. (It wont mow the yard for a few weeks, but who says we cant do a few “test donuts”?)
We have the actuator installed on the transmission (see below).
Stay tuned for a video of us testing the hardware and a short human controlled demo.
gMow is a GPS Based Mowing System that it based off a Toro Zero Turn (but really, any zero turn will work), and a Java Based micro computer (and a few other goodies that go with it.)
The idea is to let actuators control the movements that your arms use to make. You will still have to crank it and possibly drive it to its start point, but when you have 9 acres doing it yourself is no fun! It will then control itsself and work inside a set area using its Web Based interface (it will stay inside a polygon you create out of GPS points).
Why build our own when there are already mowers out there? Well the main reason is we didn’t want to bury a signal wire, and most of those system run off electricity and have a range of MAYBE 2 acres max. Plus, something so tiny cant get high grass and such. A Zero Turn can get practically anything that we have in our yard.
So yeah, gMow! But what does that g mean? Originally i jokingly said lets just call it gMow, because everything google does seems to work right and the name stuck, but im going to say the g either means “gps based MOW” or “ghost MOW”. I like Ghost MOW, because it is gonna look like a ghost is mowing when we are done.
Okay anyway, enough of my ramblings. Stay tuned for updates!