Raspberry Pi and Raspberry Pi Pico Team Up for Robot Lawnmower Project
A DIY project sees the electronics of a robot lawnmower drastically upgraded using two Raspberry Pi boards
This may look like a normal robot lawnmower, the sort that trundles mindlessly around suburban lawns all over the country; but OpenMower is more than that, thanks to the clever use of two Raspberry Pi boards. The brainchild of German tech entrepreneur Clemens Elflein; and reported on by Hackster; OpenMower upgrades the internals of a standard robot mower to make it smarter using a Raspberry Pi 4; and the Raspberry Pi Pico.
Little more than weaponized robot vacuum cleaners, most robot mowers operate using a perimeter wire that they may not cross. They stay inside the area defined by the wire; and if they run into something; or otherwise detect an obstacle in their path; they will randomly change direction and head off until they encounter another obstacle or wire. This way, they cut all the grass, but can produce a random pattern and potentially an uneven cut.
To fix this, Elflein took apart an off-the shelf robot lawnmower. He discovered that it used standard connectors to fit together, so kept the shell, motors, chassis, and blade; but gave it a heavy electronics upgrade in the form of a Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi Pico; custom speed control system, and an Ardusimple RTK (real time kinematics) GPS board. The RTK GPS board provides both coarse GPS location data, along with a correction stream (RTK) which sharpens the accuracy from meters to centimeters.
Read more: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-mows-lawns
