Michel from Quebec, Canada recently bought a EGO brand battery powered lawn mower to which he added an ESP8266 module along with a PIC MCU and a couple of hall sensors to make it an IoT-enabled mowing device that is now capable of sending tweets during its mowing session.
IoT enabled lawn mower
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 160×128 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.
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