Where are you Cris? 433MHZ is for EU use. 913mhz is USA.
Those look like knock-off holybro radios. Don’t buy them. Make sure you’re getting the real thing. Either Holybro or mRo. Might cost you a few extra dollars but they’ll work. These clones can be a real crapshoot.
Good catch - will cancel and take a look at the others! Delivery wouldn’t have been till Jan sometime - redirecting now!
Austin Tx - would have the FCC all over me if you hadn’t let me know!
SiK Telemetry Radio V3
500mW 915MHz
2 $125.98
$30 for shipping, should have put this on my controller order!
I just wanted to put a post out there to let people know that MowStock 2024 is going to take place down in Louisiana coming up in March. It is a great place to see mowers built by other builders and to compare notes.
Our thanks go out to @Swebre2023 for hosting this again…
DATE CORRECTION! MOWSTOCK 2024 - March 15-17, Church point, LA)-,Rover/Mower/Drone%20Folks!,best%20practices%20and%20share%20experiences%20with%20putting%20these%20autonomous%20contraptions%20together.,-We%20will%20have
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Hello,
I am looking for advice/to see what camera setups people are using on their large outdoor rovers…if any. What equipment is a good idea and what just doesnt work very well.
The intended use of the rover is for mowing fields. On the rover I intend to use a pi for accessing the pixhawk. A camera for monitoring. I intend to put a router on the rover with a low latency 5ghz backhaul to a mast (to insure line of sight). The idea is to have mission planner running on a pc, and a video feed open on a browser window.
So far I connected a usb webcam to a raspberry pi 4 (bullseye) and had it streaming to my browser using an mjpg streamer. I was very happy with myself until I added Mavlink to the pi and then the camera would not stream anymore, giving a message “Init v4L2 failed”. This might be a memory issue … and I could hack a solution with a bit of research, but I am wondering if I will just have more issues hence my reaching out via this post.
For anyone stuck getting mjpg streaming using a pi and a USB webcam. Below worked for a few days until I added more software to the pi.
Inspiration from Camera installation - Drone Programming - Drone Dojo
Inspiration from 軟硬體的天空: Stream Video - Raspberry Pi + USB Webcam
To make a USB webcam work on a Raspberry Pi V4 using 64bit Raspian on date 21 Jan 24 running Bullseye. I did enable the camera on sudo raspi-config but not sure if it is needed for a USB camera as opposed to using the dedicated Pi connector.
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sudo apt-get update
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sudo apt-get install libjpeg8-dev
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sudo apt-get install cmake libjpeg62-turbo-dev:armhf (this works on the 64bit Pi. Libjpeg9-dev worked on the 32 bit Pi )
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sudo apt-get install imagemagick
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sudo apt-get install libv4l-dev
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sudo apt-get install libjpeg-dev
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sudo apt-get install cmake
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wget https://github.com/jacksonliam/mjpg-streamer/archive/master.zip
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unzip master.zip
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cd mjpg-streamer-master
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cd mjpg-streamer-experimental
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make clean all
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sudo make install
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ls -al /dev/ |grep video – check if your webcam is supported on Raspberry Pi
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v4l2-ctl --list-devices – List devices for v4l2 interface
To view the video feed paste the following into a web browser on the same LAN
./mjpg_streamer -i “/usr/local/lib/mjpg-streamer/input_uvc.so -y -d /dev/video0 -n -f 6 -r 640x480” -o “/usr/local/lib/mjpg-streamer/output_http.so -p 8084 -w /usr/local/share/mjpg-streamer/www”
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I havent yet put a camera on our mower, but will at some stage.
No companion computer and no plans for one.
My thinking at this stage is to grab an old android phone and run free and excellent
IP web cam software on it.
Where we mow is 100% wifi coverage, so im expecting no challenges.
It can select between front and back camera’s and stream rtsp at high resolutions and low latencies. Have a play with an old android phone, its good fun.
Hardest part is keeping the phone dry and powered.
Thanks for your reply Paul. I got sidetracked setting up a cube orange to replace my cube black.
Thats a cool idea. Having an android on board might be useful in other ways. You can anydesk/teamviewer into it to manage other peripherals. For instance, I am using a JK bms for a lithium battery that powers the drone, and the jk bms is managed using an android app over bluetooth. It allows me to turn on/off the discharge (so power cycle the drone), on/off the charger and on/off the cell balancing which is cool.
Hi Steve J.
O hope you’re doing well!
I was away for a while due to the demand for work here in Brazil, but during this time I was buying the components that I understood as necessary to be able to automate my lawn mower. This model of the lawn mower, is operated by treadmills by electric motors, my idea is to put the control output of the Pixhawk to command the engine drivers that are original of the tractor. Here are some photos to get to know my lawn mower.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1nfig4WIUy0ZyqfveTCpK921sl1Euk-Ll
It appears that you will have no need for servos since you will be controlling ESC’s. How to interface to the existing electronic speed controllers on your mower will take some work. I have no experience in interfacing to ESC’s but I am sure you will find help from other users who have experience in this area.
I like the idea of not needing servos and the mechanical linkage setup.
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That is an interesting looking mower. What model is it? It looks like a slope mower of some sort but to find one that is all electric seems special.
I can’t tell the exact model of the FlySky radio transmitter/receiver in that picture but it looks like the 6 channel model. Technically the bare minimum number of channels is 4 but it in the real world most users prefer 10 to 16 channels to allow more things to be added (like a remote kill switch, remote arm/disarm switch, expanded function control, blade control, etc). Also I do know that some of those FlySky models can be upgraded to operate with 10 channels.
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I have a similar slope mower that I intend to convert soon and document via video. It should be very straightforward. The project keeps getting put on the back burner for any number of reasons, but I need to get it done!
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I bought this lawn mower through AliExpress By the company Vote Machinary, I’m adding the datasheet below for your knowledge.
About the radio control I confirm that it is the FlySky of 6 channels, good to know that about increasing the capacity of controls by the channels. Initially I was thinking of dealing with a PPM splitter to be able to perform more controls. Maybe increasing the quantities of channels is enough for this demand. Thanks again.
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I feel your difficulty, due to the other demands.
I will sending the evolution of my project here, and certainly you could help me by having a broad knowledge about Pixhawk, ArduSimple F9P and Mission Planer parameters
Congrats on the crawler mower - its looking like the start of an interesting project.
We’re now able to mow large paddocks with ours. Accuracy is +/- 50mm mostly.
some observations and challeges on our project.
- Crawler mower - 700mm wide, 16HP, 24v 500w motors, converted from RC to Ardupilot
- 2x F9P, Qiotek Zealot flight controller, RFD900x, corrections via NTRIP and mission planner
The chinese mower is excellent including the Loncin 465cc motor.
Challenges have been
a) black box ESC’s no documentation and not strong enough. Replaced these with VESC’s huge win.
b) Seals on roller bearings on tracks - way too tight and binding. Have removed, but problematic.
c) Machine is slow. 0.7m/s - it takes a long time to do a lawn. We’re looking to speed it up. 1m/s+
d) Machine is great at mowing slopes, its goes anywhere.
e) Please add front and back protection - it will eat your toes. Bumpers will keep your feet away…
Hardest part of project - Dealing with Deck height control and short grass, long grass. Mower will stall out with easily if it gets some long grass. Until you get that sorted, you have to watch/listen for stalled motor and “silent pretend mowing…” at least until the battery runs down.
Here is an example https://youtu.be/ZLtWCLwtgT4?t=162
To make it work for us - it needs to be " Eyes Off " - so no stalling, no runaways, no running kids over etc.
Enjoy your project.
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Excellent project. Have been mowing large areas with autonomous mowers for several years now and have often thought about monitoring engine RPM and reducing forward speed when it drops off by 10% or so and resume forward speed when it clears itself. Would be very useful for us. Perhaps a winter project…. Good luck!
PS - Those bumpers are an excellent idea.
PPS - DATE CORRECTION! MOWSTOCK 2024 - March 15-17, Church point, LA
Dear Paul, thank you very much for the ideas and experiences shared!
Replacing parts is really worrying, as it is a product from China, spare parts are usually a headache.
Regarding the ESC, I had added this model to do some tests https://www.dimensionengineering.com/datasheets/Sabertooth2x32.pdf
I made a test cut and actually due to the height of the cut, it touched the ground and tripped the circuit breaker. This will be one of the challenges.
Can you give me some light regarding the power supply circuit, as the circuit works with a 12Vdc battery and the PixHawk with a 5Vdc power supply, for this it uses a power supply circuit. For this, are you using a circuit with a battery suitable for the Pixhawk or did you use a 12V to 5V voltage step-down source?
Again thanks for all
re Parts from China. The ESC’s tha came with the mower were labelled “mower speed controller” and nothing else. Really just a black box. The engineering on our mower has been to a high standard, well made and thought out, with no items (apart from ESC) being hard to source or work around. The Loncin motors are very common, the oil filter is OEM same as KTM so really easy to purchase locally, cheaply, and thats been consistent with the rest of the kit.
Power has been drama free for us. The petrol motor drives a 24v alternator which charges 2x 12v deep cycle batteries in series. We have pulled 12v from one - which then goes into a power module - for 5v for the flight controller, and a bit of info on volts/current.
I’ve used a few other 12v - 5v regulators for RFD900x (after the link dropped when i beeped the horn 
) The existing wiring from factory is all fuse protected, with good sized relays for starter motor and ignition cut out etc. Im aware i have a ground loop and no optoisolation from the VESC’s which apparently causes lots of problems with blown electronics. Relatively low voltage and currents set in the VESC’s im guessing is helping here. Cheers.
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I’ve got it working well enough to be able to go and do some other stuff while the mower is doing its thing, which was very not possible without the stall protection script (and the RTKfix checker)
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