Hefty beauty GAGA gets voluptuous new undercarriage Our autonomous lawnmower has had a hard summer, with brains, brawn and even her skeleton delayed, but despite failing to manage 2012's growth, she's still on track to wreak graminoid havoc - if just a little later than hoped. The grass has, quite literally, been growing beneath our feet while we waited for RS Components to …
At least you're withholding the actual part which does the cutting until you can determine exactly how intelligent the beast is going to be.
I think you need to target dog like intelligence, border collie that is, not springer spaniel.
Too much or too little intelligence could be bad for the human race as we know it.
You might wish to check out Katy Levinson's talks on the defcon website. It may save a lot of pain and heartache. If nothing else it's entertaining. For example, velcro is your friend. Battery plus C-clamp equals fire.
Note: It's been a while since I listened to the talks so I cannot recall if they are completely safe for work.
All men ought to have a rite of passage, by doing a basic welding certificate at puberty.
It's a dirty shitty job, but it's a brilliant skill to have as a hobby.
And it's a nice thing to be able to make things that do not shed rather large fastly spinning chunks of steel at ones lower regions - because of fundamentally bad welds in intrinsically important areas.
You really want to be able to physically cut the power from a distance.
Find a sufficiently-high current rating 2 or 4-pole connector, (eg the ones found in forklift trucks) add loop of wire to one sex and wire the other in series with the battery.
(4-pole means it can be an aux. charging socket as well)
Then you can grab that loop and yank it out to immediately shut down the machine should it blow something and jam a motor on, or get bored with grass and go on a rampage.
Just to clarify - a (reasonably-priced) switch isn't good enough.
Most designs of switch can weld together internally should they get overloaded (eg motor controller failure), also you really want to be able to hold "the keys" in your hand or in a safe box when working on this thing so it's definitely impossible for it to fire up the Spinny-bit of Death (and grass-cutting)
Yours, a former Robot Wars competitor...
The Slingsby T.21 Cadet (vintage glider first flown in 1944) uses the spitfire tailwheel as a main landing gear. And these tires are becomming harder and harder to come by. (There have been reports of people digging up crashed spitfires to get their hands on an original. I can't testify to the veracity of those tales though)
In other news, I still think the castor wheel is going to give you problems when moving over rough terrain, but we'll see how it handles.
I'll go grab my coat. I'd rather be flying right now anyway...
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