Mowing the lawn is the outdoor equivalent to vacuuming your carpet: it has to be done regularly, and most people put it off. But now you don’t need a riding mower with dual-cupholders to impress the neighbors while being slovenly. Husqvarna has just introduced an iPhone app for remote deployment of their Automower robotic lawnmowers with GPS Communication Units.
The Automower works by following a thin wire laid on or under the grass. Using SMS Text Messaging, you can display the location of your mower on Google Maps, tell your machine when to start and stop, return for a charge, or check current operating status. There’s also a GPS Theft Tracking feature in case your mower ventures too far away under somebody else’s control. Would that be called Find My Lawnmower?
Doing yardwork from the couch gets my vote! Or it would, if I had a lawn…
[via TG Daily]
Adam Rosen is an Apple certified IT consultant specializing in Macintosh systems new and old. He lives in Boston with two cats and too many possessions. In addition to membership in the Cult of Mac, Adam has written for Low End Mac and is curator of the Vintage Mac Museum. He also enjoys a good libation.
10 responses to “Couch Potato’s Delight – Control Your Lawnmower with Your iPhone”
The need for the wires ruins the idea for me.
Follow the link to the Husqvarna site and read about how it works. The wire is for border detection. It’s most likely low voltage. You stake it into the ground around the edge of your lawn, and the mower stops and re-directs itself whenever it rolls over the wire. A couple models don’t even use a wire.
I think this is a good application of automation. Lawn mowing is drudgery and time consuming. If this thing works well, it’s a great way to keep your lawn mowed. Downside is that they’re priced around $3K, so you can’t spend too much time on the couch–get back to work so you can afford one!
This would be awesome if it were cheaper and had a camera so you can control it with your iPad!
Lawn mowing is not particularly time consuming unless you have a big lawn (which these things can’t really handle well). I have a decent size yard for a standard city lot (.1 acre), and it took me a little over a half hour to mow it with a reel mower and rake up yesterday – it was even overgrown so I had to make multiple passes. When I was a kid I could do our .25 acre suburban lot in about 45 minutes with a push-but-self propelled gas mower… but still put it off, because I was a lazy kid/teen :) And that’s only once every couple weeks at most usually.
It’s the edging and weeding and trimming that take hours to do a yard properly, and this does nothing for that. Mowing is just a good warm up before the hard stuff, and/or gets you off the couch and in the sun for a few minutes.
And yeah, at the price, hire the neighbor kid. :D