We've been putting a massive amount of planning and work into turning the house behind me
into the tech house of dreams for our hypothetical guy, Guy.
But today is not about Guy, it's about me.
With the interior looking like this right now, it's gonna be our main focus, at least until the fall.
So I need some kind of low maintenance or ideally zero maintenance solution
to handle some of the exterior grooming. That is where Memotion comes in.
They sponsored this video and sent over their Luba three,
giving us the idea of setting up a completely automated start to finish solution.
I'm talking, the garage door opens on its own, the lawn mower goes out, does its thing, goes back in,
it closes back up, nobody touches it.
Can we pull this off? Sure hope so. Our goal is to set up a home automation system
that in tune with our mowing schedule is gonna open up the garage so the Luba three
can make its way out, maintain the lawn and then once it's finished, come inside,
after which the garage will automatically close. Sounds simple enough, but our 40 year old garage door opener
isn't exactly smart home ready. So that's our first task and I'm gonna accomplish that
with some help from one of our new writers, Michael, who brought our home assistant setup for this automation.
I also brought my Tailwind IQ three, which is gonna control our dumb garage door opener.
Realistically, we could have used a simpler relay like you set up at your house.
But IQ three includes a door sensor, isn't ridiculously expensive,
and it has a good reputation for low latency and higher liability.
Hopefully it also has a reputation for being simple because garage doors are one of those home improvement
things that I just pay a pro to do.
So step one is we're gonna mount one side
of the door sensor right here. It's got this kind of cute little like ratcheting thing
that you put in as much as you can. And then, oh wow, that's actually on there pretty good.
And we just tighten with a wrench and wow,
that is not going anywhere. Now we gotta do the other side.
What's the best way to close this now? We're gonna need power.
Yeah, I plugged it in. Well, there's no power in the house. Right, right, right, right, right. The whole panel's disconnected.
You know what, no, probably easier to just do this and then just close it.
There we go. Oh boy. No, no, keep going, keep going.
This is the moment when we find out. Hey, I did. I put it somewhere where there's not gonna be
something in the way. Nice. We missed some stuff on the checklist
of things we need for this. So we don't have our alcohol or rags, but.
Hand sanitizer and the inside of your shirt will do in a pinch.
Now, in a perfect world, I would actually probably screw this in,
but I think our plan in the longer term is actually to make this the workshop side of the garage
and have the other side be the car side. So this is a permanentary temperance install.
So I'm gonna use the double-sided tape. The alignment on this doesn't need to be crazy close,
but it does need to be pretty close. Right around there.
Should do just nicely. The polarity doesn't matter for these wires.
So all we gotta do is twist them together, cap them off either with a marette or a crimp
or whatever works for you. They're not high-voltage wires.
Then the kit includes a nice little variety of cable management clips to get this back up to the opener.
Man, did I just say that these clips were really handy because I take it back.
I could clean that spot off perfect and stuck it, this adhesive sucks.
Going for the zip ties. This is pretty DIY friendly.
Obviously you could put more time into the cable management if you really wanted to,
but that took me about seven minutes
and I'd say it's acceptable. Now all we've gotta do is strip two of these ends
and then we're gonna put them into our tailwind hub here into door one sensor and then common.
So that's just the ground right next to it. Then to connect this to the garage door opener,
we flip around to the other side and we take this little included pigtail
and we plug into garage door one dry contact.
And then this goes into the back where the dry contact switch would normally be activated.
Now all that's left is plugging into power and syncing up the app.
All right, thank you, sir. We do not have power here at the house,
but we do have a jackery. So this should work.
Hey, look at it go. Okay, big moment.
All right, that's good. That's the warning, sophisticated.
Nice. Now on our side, you can see closed.
Now we click it again, opening and open.
And it gets that from the sensor data. Okay. Now we just have to start setting up the lawn mower.
You know, depending how things go, we may end up keeping the tailwind as part of the final installation for GE.
It supports all kinds of automations, including things like opening up the garage door automatically
when you turn onto your street. In fact, I'd even be pretty interested in something like that.
But for now, let's take a closer look at the Luba 3.
Which should have even less assembly than last time.
Now that there's no RTK antenna or extra wires required on the outside.
For the base station, the idea is to have it near-ish the door,
leaving enough space around it for obstacle avoidance. And then obviously having it close enough to our jackery
that it's going to be able to charge up our Luba. Did I say jackery?
Sorry, I meant two of these Blue Yeti AC300s.
Because we're going to leave this unattended for long periods of time,
and we want to be able to handle the 210 watt fast charging for the Luba.
This is going to give us plenty of capacity for that. Now let's have a look at the mower itself.
This is the 5000H model, and the H indicates that the blade has a higher range
for the blade height for maintaining a longer length if you're into that sort of thing.
And wow, they really have cut down
on the assembly for this thing. Basically all we got to do is plug in this front spring-loaded pressure bar,
and eh. That way it's going to know
if it accidentally runs into anything. Then on the bottom, we screw on these safety bumpers.
As you can see, this unit isn't exactly clean.
That's because we've already done some validation to make sure that it's going to be suitable for our use case.
It's more than suitable. It's actually kind of overkill. This thing is rated to do like,
I think a 5,400 square foot lawn or something like that between charges.
Ours is a fair bit smaller than that. But that doesn't mean
that we can't use some of its more advanced features. And a big one is its ability to very accurately
map out your lawn, go about its business, and return to home base.
Two more things. We've got to put this little key in the back or it will not do anything.
And then I actually forgot to tighten on the bumper.
There we go. Let's throw it on the base station now.
Excellent. Hey, charging indicator already, just like that. Now the rest of the setup is going to be through the app.
Once you add lawnmower in the app, it should automatically detect a lawnmower
through Bluetooth, boop. And I helped.
Now the RTK reference station, we don't need that anymore because every single emotion unit
comes bundled with a 4G SIM card and free service.
It should just work throughout Europe and North America. And that's just for positioning, correct?
It's just for positioning. Cool. So now you don't need any exterior RTK sensors
and you can just rely on its own SIM card, Bluetooth, and your Wi-Fi connectivity.
Now that that's detected, the next thing we have to do is make sure that it is using that iNavi service.
So we're going to go over to our RTK settings. Our signal is good.
For positioning mode, we're going to click on that and hit iNavi net RTK.
And now it should just have net RTK setup. Okay.
Now we have to set up our map, but first we need to open up the garage.
Oh, right. Which we can do with our home assistant automation.
Huzzah! Now to create a map. No toys, wires, branches, sticks, et cetera.
No problem. Start mapping.
I think I'm going to do manual mapping. Just things are a little cluttered right now.
All right. We select go to lawn,
forward, lift.
I'm going to try to do this as much like I would want it to do as possible.
Don't mind me. I'm just taking my lawnmower for a walk.
In case of mistakes, hold the joystick reverse button. Robot will reverse along its previous route.
Oh, cute. Okay. In, in, in, in, in, in it. It's worth noting that you don't have to draw
the most perfect outline in the world. I'm just being a bit of a perfectionist right now.
And we're back to the start. My lawn has been mapped successfully.
Now it is worth noting that I was obviously taking it for a walk,
but as I was doing that, it was using LiDAR and computer vision
in order to make a 3D map of the space. So theoretically, I can add another lawn,
but we're not actually planning to upkeep the back because we don't care about that.
So we're just going to do the front. So then I'm good to go. Start mowing, right?
Not quite. Before we do that, I just want to go over here to create,
and I'm going to create a no-go zone because the last thing I want
is this thing trying to mow these.
That probably wouldn't go too well for the blades.
Mapping successful. Nice. With the grass this high and this thick in some places,
we don't want to try to go super short. So that's why we're having that really nice range
for the mowing height. It's going to come in handy for us. I'm thinking maybe we go for like eight centimeters.
Just give it a little trim. You know what I'm saying?
And start. Here it goes.
You can really see with how our neighbor obviously takes care of his place
that it was important for this to not look like this all the time.
Look at her go bud. She's ripping bud.
You know, tracking the progress here. Like it's fricking accurate, hey?
Like it's really going exactly where I told it
for better or for worse. With the lawn mapped and the mower back in its dock,
all that's left is setting up our home assistant automation. Right now we're going to trigger the automation manually,
but once we can see that the mower can consistently do its job, then we'll set a schedule.
We're going to have our first event happen in parallel with the mower being sent out to mow
and the garage door opening up. Once the mower has reached the lawn,
the garage door will be triggered to close. And once it has a progress of at least 95%
or a state of returning back to the dock, then the garage will open back up
waiting for the mower's return. Once the mower is back in its base station,
the garage door will close and that'll be the end of the automation. So in theory, no one should have to touch it.
And now the rest is just going to be up to Linus. I gotta say, it's pretty cool seeing it power through
some of those really thick patches. You might have noticed we don't have any slopes on our lawn,
but the Luba can also use that power with its four independently driven motors
to handle just about any terrain, including slopes up to 38 degrees or an 80% grade.
Now the only question is, will our automations run without manual intervention?
And if this trail cam footage is anything to go by,
the answer is yes, but what's this?
On day three, we added a couple of obstacles to the lawn to see how Mamosan's AI obstacle avoidance handles them.
Will it, won't it, will it?
Success! Mamosan's detection can pick up over 300 different common lawn obstacles.
And if one of your concerns is things that are alive on your lawn,
they've got a night mode that's designed to detect animals like hedgehogs to hopefully,
help save them from a very uncomfortable fate. Also, you can just avoid running your Luba at night.
With everything automated to the point where I can completely ignore it,
all we've got to do is adjust our schedule. I think once a week should be enough.
Might actually want to adjust the mower height as well. That first cut did not bring it short enough.
Good call. Dropping the blade to the lowest setting might have been a bit aggressive,
but we tackled the full 95 square meter lawn in under 40 minutes.
And with our schedule dialed in, our setup is looking set and forget for the rest of the summer.
Massive thanks to our sponsor Memotion. You guys can check out the Luba 3
at the link in the video description. Don't judge the job behind me too much yet.
It's not even finished its first run. I just shot this outro on the first day.