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IOT Lawn Mower

This is the first lawn mower connected to the Internet!

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A month ago I bought an EGO Cordless Lawn Mower and I thought it might be interesting to make an IOT of it. I hooked up a PIC18F25K22 @64MHz to our lovely ESP8266 and started coding.

To make sure I would not void my mower's warranty I've used 2 Hall Effect sensors and a few magnets: one on the bail switch, five on a wheel. Three revolution of a rear wheel represent a distance of 245cm (~96½"). There are 10 spokes on the back of the wheel. With five magnets this gives me a resolution of 16.33cm (6.43"). The display I'm using is a Digole 160x128 True Color TFT LCD. I like Digole's displays because they have a backpack with a complete graphic engine and 7 preloaded fonts. The kit run on 2 AAA batteries. The ESP8266 is initialized on power-up to get the actual time on my Windows Home Server and placed to sleep to minimize the power consumption. When it's time to publish a hard reset is done. At the end of transmission the ESP8266 is put to sleep again.

I opened a Twitter account (@MyEGOMower) and a ThingSpeak channel for the mower. At the end of each "mowing session" I push a button and my mower publish the results on Twitter (via PushingBox ) and ThingSpeak (https://thingspeak.com/channels/38135 ). A recipe on "If This Then That" (https://ifttt.com) watch the Twitter account and post a message on my personal Facebook page with the Tweet just to annoy my friends!

  • Memory upgrade!

    Michel06/22/2015 at 02:36 0 comments

    Done some surgery on the circuit: added a 64kB flash memory to store more Tweets. The lawnmower is becoming more and more self-aware. I'm scared the day Skynet will take over the world my lawnmower will try to kill me... doesn't matter: had the first internet connected lawnmower!

    Also added an external antenna to the ESP-07 (router in the basement).


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Sergey wrote 09/29/2015 at 11:53 point

Nice idea, Michael. Do you have a detailed description of this project? I wonder why do you need a PIC18F25K22 chip if you already have a ESP8266 on board?

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Michel wrote 11/04/2015 at 02:45 point

I could have used just an ESP8266 alone but I'm quite busy and I don't have time to learn LUA :( . I had working pieces of code so I just reused them. But I do have time to make some stupid projects like this one: https://hackaday.io/project/8299-halloween-2015-farting-skeleton
About the detailed description of this project... I'll try to post more information.

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Evan Allen wrote 11/06/2015 at 00:43 point

You can pretty easily program the esp8266 in arduino, I do and it works great (then again, it you're not used to that either...)

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Mike Szczys wrote 06/10/2015 at 15:30 point

Nice job with the magnetic encoders!

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