(aka the follow up to http://www.krisbuytaert.be/blog/testing-robomow-510)
Lennert was really helpful in dropping by and providing us with some extra isolaters for the cable... the RoboMow is now doing it's work nicely again.
Yet we ran into another hickup. for some reason the Robomow stopped. The bleeping sound indicated yet another cable cut .. but I couldn't find it ...until I opened the the docking station ... where I saw the cable had loosened , after fixing that ... everything started working fine again ..
Now somehow the docking station of the RoboMow doesn't close good anymore , it really is a hassle pull it tight .. you need to lift it a bit and pull in the lid from the inside ...with the risk of needing to realign the dockingstation with the cable again so the mower can find it's way home again .
Also last week I got a new battery for our Roomba, and some things dawned on me. The Roomba does not need a cable to find it's way. It uses lighthouses to create borders, aka virtual walls or detects stuff where it runs into and rides back. Much easier to install than a cable in your garden. Also a virtual wall can't be cut by a knife.
The Roomba is also capable of finding it's base station with no cables. It's actually pretty good at that if you tell it to dock it goes straight to it's target.. no need to first find a cable to follow back home.
The Roomba we have is almost 4 years old , so it's not like this is bleeding edge technology. So it makes you wonder why a RoboMow needs a cable anyhow..
Also by putting the sensor on the robot outside of the mowing area it would make life a lot easier When you read this you might think I`m not really satisfied with the Robomow, on the contrary ..
Like a lot of technologies it takes a while to settle in to your environment and to tune it so it fits your needs better. RoboMow is no different .. once you have the layout of your cable solved (digged in preferrably) it works awesome .. it provides us with some free time we didn't have before .. It's just that for a 4 week test you don't want to go trough the trough the trouble of actually digging it in .. specially since we opted to not install it on the front lawn yet and it will need rerouting then anyhow.
As you might notice this post is a couple of weeks late ... and obviously you want to know the final verdict,
Well .. as you might have figured .. the Robomow is still happy mowing my lawn .. we're figuring out if we are going to redesign our garden before adding the second area in the front or not but fundamentally it's a great device that helps us a lot and we couldn't live without anymore.
