RC Lawn Mower - RCTESTFLIGHT

this video is sponsored by gadget discovery club more on them later so the really obvious practical application for my autonomous rover is an autonomous lawn mower i thought about putting some cutter heads on it but decided against it the rover was busy with its figure eight missions and i really wanted to see how the ground looked after months of it driving the same pattern i still wanted to experiment with lawn mowers though so i built up a little cutter head to test out it was basically just exacto blades on a brushless motor which is really terrifying after that i built a little trailer for my 3d printed tank with two cutter heads on it it worked really well for trimming the weeds so i'm out here at the flying field i've got the tank with a giant battery lithium-ion battery on the top um the rover's over there doing its thing but anyways these are the snow tracks so the snow tracks are not great in grass and weeds they'll probably get stuck and i'll probably have to free it but today i'm testing out this little lawnmower i threw together in like 30 minutes or so basically just has two brushless motors with some exacto blades um spinning on the bottom of this little chariot deal so let's give it a shot i think the tank itself might be just pulling more weeds out of the ground than the mower is actually cutting there's something oddly satisfying about watching grass get cut by a little chariot while this was a fun test i ultimately wanted to make something a little more capable and the trailer idea is pretty limited in what it can mow through because the tank has to drive over any grass or weeds that are going to get cut and despite being a tank it can't go through everything it also smashes the grass which makes it harder to cut so the tank is a bit too tail heavy right now with that big battery towards the rear and it keeps flipping over and some of the blades on the mower hit the tracks and the blade holders broke i wanted to make an rc mower that was capable of burrowing its way through the tallest of field grass so i got started on my next design i made this cutter head with four race drone motors on a carbon fiber bar it seems to work pretty well in long grass although i only had one motor spinning here fast forward a few days and you get this i 3d printed a protective shroud for the cutting head and mounted it all on a 1 8 scale rc rock crawler yeah it's too fast i thought this thing would be geared slower but it's pretty fast jesus wow that's i kind of don't want to be in the in the plane of those blades these blades might be set way too low let's try this out [Music] [Music] wow look at this it got a nice that's a nice strip of grass right there look at that it's it's very well trimmed huh it appears to be pushing the grass over instead of cutting it [Music] it would probably work better if the grass were dry it's pretty grassy oh yeah there's a lot of grass caked in there damn oh yeah baby baby look at that at least no grass got wrapped around the motors that's what i was really afraid of now i just have a really tough lawn oh it looks great right now only about like a centimeter of blade sticks out so it's not a lot i think i need to design a new one of these 3d printed yellow parts right here that allows more of the blade to come out and has like more infill underneath the blade so that as much grass doesn't get packed in there [Music] all in all this thing worked really well it was definitely capable of cutting my lawn and doing it this way is much more fun than using a normal lawnmower that's for sure i'm really surprised that more people haven't tried this because it seems like a great idea after those initial tests i 3d printed new shrouds that left more of the blades uncovered this seemed to allow it to cut a little better but it also sounded like it was harder on the motors it was able to cut through knee high field grass fairly well but it definitely required a few back and forth passes since the grass would pile up and make too much resistance i also had to raise the cutter head for these field grass tests [Music] one big problem with the rc rock crawler i was using was that its minimum speed was still pretty fast i needed something that was capable of driving slower so that it would have more time to cut through the thick grass and not overwhelm the cutter heads luckily hobbymatehobby.com hooked me up with two hobby wing quick fusion 540 size brushless motors the special thing about these motors is that they use field-oriented control instead of standard bldc like most other hobby brushless motors this means that they have excellent low speed control and the motor is able to provide its maximum amount of torque at any rpm even on the low end of the speed range here's the stock brushed motor running at its minimum speed notice how i can easily stall the motor by pinching the shaft now for comparison here's the hobby wing motor running at its minimum speed it's much slower and i'm not able to stall it by pinching the shaft this is because it has full torque at minimum speed pretty impressive luckily these new motors have the same outer diameter and the shaft size is the same as the old ones so it was an easy upgrade they are a bit longer due to their built-in motor drivers so i had to move one of the suspension linkages to the outside of its mounting point to make room this is a bit janky but seems to work fine to get closer to my goal of being able to burrow through the tallest of field grass i decided that more cutting equals more better so i built a second row of cutters and mounted it up high it obviously wouldn't do anything for shorter grass but for taller grass it might help break the tall strands up into smaller pieces and fling them out of the way unfortunately i was a bit too slow with this project and ended up doing the next few tests in november at this point in the year the grass is thicker down low since there's been so much buildup over the year and it's always wet since it never stops raining here in washington this makes it a lot more difficult to cut the grass but it still seems to work pretty well the upper cutter head seems to be helping a lot for the taller stuff but it's positioning probably was not optimal now a word from the sponsor of this video gadget discovery club if you like my videos then you obviously like gadgets and tech so you're going to love gadget discovery club now you've got to admit every time you get a box in the mail with some gadget that you ordered online it's pretty exciting if you're hooked on that excitement you should really consider checking out gadget discovery club unlike other subscription boxes they don't just bundle a bunch of cheap products into each box they send one high quality gadget every month now you probably won't be getting an rc lawnmower anytime soon but still the products are really good like this solar power bank that can charge your phone from the sun or these wireless earbuds that i got in my mystery box turns out they're worth 135 dollars gadget discovery club buys directly from innovative brands skipping the middleman so they can pass on the savings to you there's no commitment and you can cancel at any time it would be an awesome gift for this holiday season because you can sign up for three six or 12 month packages it's the gift that keeps on giving use the link below with promo code rc test flight to get 13 off your gadget discovery club plan thanks again to gadget discovery club now back to the video pretty gnarly just in that one little test run this motor is completely seized up looks like there might be some sticks or something that are kind of caught in there oh that's no it's kind of freed up and then this cutter head came loose on top of the motor so i need to tighten that up so i think what i need to do is reposition this top cutter head so that it's actually doing something i might flip it backwards so that the blades are totally exposed and facing forwards so they'll be spinning this way vertically so that it'll just kind of like chop through anything that comes into the whole front plane of above the front cutter the lower cutter head next i mounted it upside down and backwards which was a much better idea it just seemed to blend through the top layer of grass and fling everything out of the way [Music] hey [Music] despite the wet partially dead grass i was still pretty happy with the result it was able to eat through some pretty thick stuff although i definitely found the limits of this design pretty quickly i eventually got a little carried away and just started bashing through stuff i ended up knocking off the upper cutter head and most of the blades on the lower one broke off uh-oh we've had a critical failure i also think that using outrunner motors is really bad for this application because the shafts are not very well supported and they're designed to be lightweight if i ever revisit this project i'll use inner runners with stronger blades or i'll just strap a weed whacker on top and call it good anyways that was a fun little project and i think more people should build rc lawnmowers because they're really much more fun than normal lawn mowers here's a quick tip for those of you who might be new to the hobby and don't know a lot about lipo batteries it's actually really bad for the overall longevity of a lipo to store it for a long period of time while it's fully charged a lot of the time you might charge batteries to take to the field but then not end up using them in this case you should always discharge your batteries to a safe voltage as soon as possible before storing them that's where this handy little device comes in it's called the phantom angel and it basically just uses a light bulb to discharge your batteries to a safe voltage and then it shuts off to prevent over discharge they even have connectors for use with dji drone batteries it can help keep all your lithium batteries healthy check it out at phantomangel.rocks that's all for now thanks for watching bye

Channel: rctestflight

Views: 1,194,289

Keywords: rc, lawn, mower, lawn mower, blades, car, truck

Id: 3iPVCrq2_Ss

Length: 11min 56sec (716 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 08 2020