Builder Road Map
Important note: This project is still very early stage and you must be prepared to find a lot of info yourself and to talk to other builders in the Discord. See the FAQ for a quick overview of the state and nature of this project.
If you want to embark on building an OpenMower, we have collected an overview of the various parts and where find information and what to to below. Beware that this is not complete, but it gives you some navigation to how to go about making a project for yourself.
Please see the image to the right for an overview that we will refer to. The headlines below refer to this image.
You can find more information on the various parts in the page Building the Mower
Disclaimer
This material is provided as-is and free of charge. No guarantees of any kind are made that the information contained herein is exact or correct or does not violate any local regulations or cause any security risk. Any use you make of any information given here is at your own discretion and risk.
The Mower
Get a mower in a store
So far only the Yard Force 500 is supported. See FAQ for more about alternative mowers.
Disassemble the mower and Remove the old mainboard
See @c.ez's YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bImqD-pQSA
Now, it is ready for a new main board.
Main board
PCB and parts
At the time of writing, the main board is version 0.9.1beta and has a few issues (but is working!!), so you can either go from there or you can wait until a next revision fixes these problems.
[TODO]: @c.ez : How does one find a current BOM for the main board if going to build one-self?
[TODO] : @tinker0436 and @vamatis will try to see if a comprehensive description can be made on how to order an assembled main-board from JLCPCB.
Assembling
You need to have all the fixed parts soldered to the main board. Either you do it yourself or you find a way to order it assembled from e.g. JLCPCB.
Further parts needed
You also need
- A Raspberry Pi 4
- An RTK Module
- 3 xESC modules
- A Raspberry Pi Pico
- And check the BOM here: Building the Mower
Getting the xESC's
There are currently two versions of the xESC (of which you need 3 for the main board).
- An version base on the STM32 chip. Information about that is in the git repo https://github.com/ClemensElflein/xESC. That is working and tested, but it is hard to get the STM32s and the soldering is technical and one cannot order the part pre-assembled due to parts sitting on both sides of the PCB. But you can go ahead and build those now.
- A new version, simpler and cheaper, and based on the RP2040 chip. That is currently (2022-05-01) under final revision and should be available ca medio May. That should be possible to order assembled from JLCPCB, once ready. So you might want to wait for that.
Base station with the base RTK GPS module
[TODO] @c.ez : Need info.
Charging Station
Get a CC/CV module
This is currently needed to fix the charging station provided by Yard Force due to incompatibilities with the replaced main-board. It should be possible to fix this issue, but right now, it is necessary. See Building the Mower for where to get it.
Upgrade the Charging Station
[TODO] no information yet here