Testing the RoboMow 510

Kris Buytaert — Wed, 22 May 2013 20:33:20 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I noted fellow geek Peter Vanwelkenhuysen was talking about his #robomowtest experiences. obviously I wanted to know how he got to test one.

Some tweets and mails later I was making arrangements with Lennert van der Pols from Friendly Robotics too.
I've been thinking about buying a RoboMower for years . always have been delaying the purchase since we were planning to move
Since we moved, my wife has been a bit sceptic

So last week Lennert came by and gave us almost an hour of explanation on , he guided us trough the basic functions of the Robomow, gave us some advise on where to lay the cable.
And how to operate, the device. He also explained us that we could make a hole in the fence and have the Robomow , mow the front part too , rather than pick up the mower and move it manually.

Don't be surprised we got an Albino one :)

I didn't really have time to install the wire till later that evening.

Pinning down the back part of our lawn (we opted not to do both front and back during the test period) , took me about an hour. Some of the pins broke during the installation

We have a cherry tree with some big trunks and they could be troublesome .. so we evaded that part. as it was near the back of the garden and
Also in the left back behind the swing there is more moss than grass so we opted to lay the cable before the left back pole of the swing.

So after the first attempt of pinning down the cable in the ground , it was time to power on the Robomower , I was greeted with a pretty straight forward menu to configure it.
I`m one of those persons who really doesn't like user interfaces in my natvive language , Dutch. So I have pretty much all of my electronics in English... the problem with the
Robomow and English is that it assumes you live in a country that doesn't understand the metric system. So I had to convert the size of my garden to sft.
(I checked for options in the menu later, but Lennert confirmed there's no option to put to the metric system )

It takes a couple of times to align the basestation with the wire, but after the Robomow starts testing if it can crawl along your garden.

I have to admit that the frustrating part of the installation starts here. Around the trees we had some parts where the trunks were creating a little to steep trail, it took me about 4-5 runs before I eventually got
it right. The Robomow really takes its time to get stuff right. One of the problems we had was that one of the corners didn't really have that much grass, and each time the
mower passed it made the ground softer so after a couple of runs it actually got stuck I had to tighten in the corner.

So after installing the Robomow it was a good time to let it mow for the very first time, it ran for about an hour.

I was in the middle of a Hangout with some collegues as I suddenly noticed that the Robomow had stopped.
Apparently even while I had been very carefully putting the cable in I hadn't been carefull enough... The Robot had cut it's own wire and decided to call it a day.
(this was wednesday evening) .

On thursday morning I tried quickly tried fixing the cable as described in the video below...

However at my first attempt the blue isolater failed to actually lock the cables inside and I had to rush to work.

Fast forward to saturday evening.. the first timeslot I had to actually fix the cable... with a bit more patience I actually managed to secure the cables again , and the robot started doing it's work again.
I reprogrammed it to leave it's base every day at 8 in the morning rather than the default 1300, that way by the time the weather is good enough for the kids to play outside the lawn has been mown.

Monday and tuesday morning it rained ... on tuesday I saw the robot come out for a short while.. then decide to do the smart thing and go back to it's base station.
Today however the weather was dry.. so the robot had time to go on a suicide mission again ... yes that's right .. it managed to cut its cable again ...

TBC...

Will Poken catch on ?

Kris Buytaert — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 22:29:21 +0000

Poken is the new gadget in town. Some people called it the future of social networking.

The idea of exchanging data at the click of a button , or less has been here fore ages. The problem always is that the tool needs to gain Critical Mass before it becomes useful.

I remember transferring my VCard from my Palm Pilot or Handspring Visor to other people's Palm Pilot , or using different IrDA protocols to transfer my details between different phones, that worked fine, for the happy few that had similar devices. These days we transfer details over SMS' messages or Bluetooth, but then they are stuck in the mobile phone, with the Palm I at least imported them in my PIM.

The thing is not everybody had a Palm, not everybody had a IrDa enabled phone , and people tend to turn off Bluetooth for security reasons. The idea of adding a (soon to be rebranded) TikiTag to your business card seemed cool, So far I could hand out 2 cards to people whom I was absolutely sure they had a reader ,

So different efforts have tried already the same .. to exchange digital data while people had physical contact. none of them seems to have catched on .. yet.

My Poken is on the way .. maybe this time it will catch on .. who knows .. it surely looks more viral than the others ...

Everything is a Freaking DNS problem - gadgets

Testing the RoboMow 510

Will Poken catch on ?