I was hoping this was more of a hardware project as in building the physical mower from scratch. I am not quite sold on the robotic mowers but the quality and market for riding mowers is insane right now. I own two riding mowers and both are completely dead. One needs a rather expensive wiring harness so they it would stop catching fire when it runs. The other has the most common single cylinder engine that comes in all the mowers in the past like 30 years and it’s a terrible design that grenades itself 1-4 times a year. And the prices of these new and used are out of this world even compared to baseline inflation.
I decided to strip one of them and convert it to full electric using salvaged electric motors from Ryobi mowers and Amazon controllers. I have seen a few videos of this conversion and I do like the logic of having one motor for the drive wheels and one per blade rather than messing with fancy belts and pulleys and idlers and clutches. A really interesting part of this kind of build is that I can reuse Ryobi’s 40V batteries so I don’t need to design and build a custom battery + BMS + charging system. Just buy and wire enough connectors to run everything.
And that’s where it would be really cool to see a properly engineered project around doing something like that. I see a lot of potential here since you can get these motors for roughly $50 shipped on eBay and a controller would be about as much.