If you are lucky enough to find yourself in a position where you can afford a house, you will soon find yourself in the unfortunate position of having a yard full of grass and weeds that requires constant maintenance. For simplify the task of preventing your lawn from eatinginvest in a jungleand YouTuber turned supervillain and created a high-power grass cutting laser.
There are other ways to automate lawn maintenance, like letting a robot do all the hard work, but robotic lawnmowers require a bit more supervision than robotic vacuums. Automatic lawn mowers are not designed to handle lawns that are weeks old; instead, they mow more often, so each pass is a light clipping. That requires homeowners to be constantly vigilant about keeping the lawn clear of debris, tools, or even toys. If a Lego block is accidentally sucked up by a robovac, it’s easy to recover. If a robotic lawnmower accidentally runs over a hose, it leaves an irreparable shredded mess.
Is connecting a high power 40W blue laser from a CNC cutting machine (which is about 8000 times more powerful than a green laser pointer) to a motorized device and then narrowing its beam with an old camera lens a better alternative? easier than a robotic lawnmower? Probably not, to be honest. Is it safer? Definitely not. But it looks much cooler, with the beam slowly swinging back and forth burning up plant life and anything else that ends up in its path.
“Don’t try this at home” should be added in the video, but we’ll say it anyway: This is probably a hack that should never have been filmed and shared with the world, or even attempted, in the first place. But it is interesting to see the challenges that arose as it was gradually tested and improved.
To keep neighbors safe, the laser mower was tested against a small hill, so the beam always ended up pointing at the high ground in front of it. The laser is powerful enough to cut through blades of grass and weeds, but many times, it simply weakens plants, causing them to topple to the point of burning. That slowly decreases the effectiveness of the laser and its range, as severed and fallen plant life accumulates in its path.
Narrowing the beam further and replacing a single laser diode with an array of 24 smaller diodes improved its performance, but performance is a generous term for a lawn mower that can only cut a small six to two meter strip of grass and medium length in a week. The manufacturer upgraded the laser emitter by mounting it on an automated RC vehicle that could inch forward over time to improve the laser’s ability to cut down plant life, but with a top speed of about two meters a day, it’s still agonizingly slow the way to go. manage and automate lawn maintenance.
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Though that’s not the point. The point, as Old Ben once taught us, is to cut as civilly as possible.