I took a short break from flying tonight to remove, sharpen, and replace the blades on my custom RoninUAV riding mower.

Now I’m super itchy, wheezing, and breaking out in hives, but, I’ll be able to mow later this week which will mean I can fly lower to the ground and crash on my property without completely losing a quad.

I still want to turn this mower into an rc fpv mower, but it turns out that that is beyond my skill set and budget currently.

Pretty sure I could do it with some random bits from American Science & Surplus, but it’s more the programming that gives me pause.

Hi Lemony,

NICE !  

You know, maybe a BIG octocopter for cutting the grass.
If Rescue-1 (Tyro119) was an octo, I bet it would shear
that grass right down. 

This flight isn't anything special, I'm just inspecting the new roof.

It looks pretty damn good. They even installed anchor points on the peaks so that if I have to go up there for any reason (like to paint the dormers or retrieve a quad), I can run some rope through the d-rings so that I don't fall and break my neck.

(21-Jun-2022, 06:44 AM)Lemonyleprosy Wrote: I still want to turn this mower into an rc fpv mower, but it turns out that that is beyond my skill set and budget currently.

I wouldn't have thought the control is much harder than a RC plane.  You need some servos to control ignition, throttle, foot brake, steering and cutting blade on/off.  If it has gears it might be problematic, though.  Don't know how you would deal with that.  But the rest is probably a multi channel FC from a plane, like.  Would you use ELRS for the link, for those 5 mile cutting sessions?   Not to mention HDZero or DJI for the video?

But seriously, I think it should be possible from a skill set point of view, but budget wise probably not and a lot of hassle rests on the transmission.  On an auto with just forward and back, you could probably do it with an actuator attached to the lever, same with throttle, in fact probably actuators would suffice for most lever related tasks.  I wonder if you could use relays to activate the actuators.  Don't know how you could do the steering, but maybe connect a chain/band to the wheel and connect the other side to a motor.

It would be an interesting project.

The biggest issue/cost is the actual movement of the things.
I think I could fairly easily take a pwm signal from an rx and make that control things, but it’s the things that would move things that could get expensive. Large enough servos to move the steering are expensive- I thought about using a motor from an old electric car seat adjuster- something like that geared up so that it doesn’t move so slow but still has the strength to move the wheels could work, and be done for free or close to.

It’s more the clutch and gear shifting that is beyond my ability and budget- I think it would need some sort of hydraulics.

As far as rc link- it’d get ELRS, because, ELRS is awesome and cheap. Video link- analog would be just fine, but it would need a heat sink and water cooling or a big fan, because I’m pretty sure that it wouldn’t get enough airflow at 3mph to keep it nice and cool.

But man, if I could make it happen so that I could mow my lawn while sitting inside my house with air conditioning, away from all of the pollen and allergens that the mower is kicking up…

Grant Imohara from Mythbusters used to remote control all sorts of vehicles, from buses to a rocket powered car. I'm sure "you can do it".
When you get ur done, show us how and we can do our lawn tractors and soforth.

Hi Lemony,

First, it looks like they did a very good job on your roof. Congratulations !
I like the idea of having "anchors" on top of the roof to attached a safety
harness to. Very Good Idea.

I really enjoy your videos. Good Job. Thanks.

As for mowing the lawn...I have seen those robotic lawn mowers, but
don't know how well they work. These would be in my skillset. 
Like this Worx Landroid for 799. This Husqvarna is more the Cadillac model.

Now, if you gotta build one,  an RC Buggy is already set up to run on the ground. 
Check out this guy's RC buggy based DIY mower. Yeah, this is almost laughable. 
But hey, it works...sort of. 



Now, if you are talking about a serious DIY, RC controlled, lawn mower that will
really cut grass, take a look at a few that I found {there are others as well}.

Now...here are just a few of the DIY, RC controlled, lawn mowers...

The Basic Gas Powered Model: 



Or this one:



I think that I like this really slick battery powered one the best:

That electric one is pretty damn slick. It’d need one hell of a battery to make it all the way through my lawn though. When I first bought this property I made the mistake of buying a battery powered weed whacker (I came from Southern California where lawns are super tiny). Yeah, I don’t think I even made it all the way down one fence line before the battery died.

Electric would significantly simplify things, but, I’m on a tight budget. I’ll have to keep an eye out- maybe someone will post a free electric mower with a bad battery on Craigslist. Doubtful, but you never know.

I don't know wtf my problem is lately, but this is the second time in a week that I've lost control when I shouldn't and then had to spend an hour stomping through weeds and blackberry brambles to retrieve my quad. The first time it was my Sohei- I lost video mid flight. This time it was my PowerPick- I had a desync mid flight. There's no reason for a desync. I've setup rpm filtering and dynamic idle. i'm not pushing anything to the limit. My idle min doesn't get anywhere near low enough to be an issue.

My finder function on my VRX was useless both times.

I also couldn't get video back after each crash- the first one with the Sohei, yeah, that's understandable because I crashed in a way that gave me a bad battery connection. This crash with the powerpick, I kept good a good battery connection- I was only able to find it because I could faintly hear my beeper.

My legs are scratched up and I'm itchy and pissed off.

I'm thinking maybe I should stick to super close proximity fliers, at least until I get some battery powered quad finder beepers.

Arrrrrrrrgh.
This is supposed to be fun, right? I'm not having fun this week.

Screw this. I'ma fly some little 75mm whoops close enough that I can't crash off of my property, and fiddle with some electronic repair.

Hi Lemony,

Like the video...up to the crash anyway. 
Those "almost in the dark" videos are just cool 

Y’know… I might actually not have dynamic idle set up on this bird/ pretty sure it’s still running bf 4.2.11, and I didn’t start using dynamic idle until 4.3 release candidates. I’ll hafta check.

I also need to check if it recorded a black box log of that last flight. I’m wondering if it the was the front right motor that desynced- it’s done it to me once before.

So yeah, this bird was still running JazzMaverick and BF 4.2.x or 4.1.x (I didn’t actually make a note of the version).

I flashed the esc’s with Bluejay, 24khz, demag compensation high, motor timing high.

Flashed BF 4.3.1, set my dynamic idle minimum to 25.
Set up all my other stuff- osd, vtx, rclink, etc, Decided to try a “filters” preset for the first time- I went with.. crap, I don’t remember. I think it was something like 4.3 normal build something something.

This thing has always been an excellent 3s cruiser- and I know that when I slap a 4s on it with 4” props I’m asking a hell of a lot out of these pancake shaped 2004 motors when I start doing flips and dives and throttle punches- but I think with my current settings I shouldn’t have anymore desync issues. Fingers crossed.

If need be I do have some smaller diameter taller motors that won’t struggle to spool up as fast as I want them to.

So far, all is good- no desyncs.

But, I forgot to add average cell voltage to my osd- it turns out that I do not have the brain power required to divide my displayed pack voltage by 3 or 4 in my head while also not crashing.

Yeah, Me Too     

In fact, I quit putting the total voltage on my OSD,
now, I only use average cell voltage; Yep, because it
is easier to know where the battery voltage is. The 
total voltage is just confusing...yeah trying to figure 
out when the pack is low. This is especially true when
you run batteries with different number of cells.
Now, what was that minimum voltage 

I'm much the same as you guys. I know what the min voltage is when it's in the range 3-4v, when it's showing the 2S voltage, not a clue. So I use that setting that shows it as a 1S pack voltage regardless of cells. Also on mine the low voltage alarms stopped working, but i'm getting used to putting it down before it would hit it.

The most confusing thing for me is when people say that on a whoop it's completely acceptable to take your cell voltages down to 3.1v. I did for a while, but it seems to screw your batteries up (I have 2 packs that no longer charge past 3.9v). I now put down at 3.5v and swap packs.