Slashdot Mirror
Building A Homebrew Robotic Lawnmower?
mmonkey writes "With the seemingly small amount of summer we get here in the UK, the last thing I want to be doing on a sunny day is mow the lawn. So I started thinking "surely a light-ish lawnmower could 'gain' a couple of motors, and suddenly be computer-controlled?". Then I started thinking about stuff like obstacle avoidance, optimum path planning, guidance system, how to get pretty-looking stripes, and I realised that it's actually a potentially complex (read: fun) thing to do. So, have any Slashdotters done this before? Did you modify an existing lawnmower or build a whole new one from scratch? What motors work best? For that matter, what type of mower works best? I know you can already get these, but that detracts from both my geek-drive and my wallet, both of which I'd prefer to keep as full as possible."
Dude, you're forgetting the audience. Here, directly from a list of sysadmin virtues in the Armidillo book:
Laziness: Writing a 250 line Perl script to avoid typing 15 characters.
Elsewhere in the book we find a sidebar entitled:
Laziness Can Be a Virtue
No one who isn't lazy writes shell scripts.
Laziness motivates you to create new tools and utilities that make your job easier,
more efficient, or even just more pleasant.
It was easy for me to find these quotes. The book caters to lazy sysadmins. They actually put "laziness" in the index.
Consider this sort of doing more work to get less done a "geek thing" and forget about it.
KFG