We Automated our Tech Lawn - Mammotion Luba 3 AWD

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 Ghee. But today is not about ghee, it's about me. With the interior looking like this right now, it's going to be our main focus, at least until the fall. So, I need some kind of lowmaintenance or ideally zero maintenance solution to handle some of the exterior grooming. That is where Mimotion comes in. They sponsored this video and sent over their Luba 3, 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, and 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 going to open up the garage so the Luba 3 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 going to accomplish that with some help from one of our new riders, Michael, who brought our home assistant setup for this automation. I also brought my Tailwind IQ3, which is going to control our dumb garage door opener. Realistically, we could have used a simple relay like you set up at your house, but the IQ3 includes a door sensor, isn't ridiculously expensive, and it has a good reputation for low latency and higher reliability. Hopefully, it also has a reputation for being simple because garage doors are one of those home improvement things that I just uh just Hey, I'm pro to do. So, step one is we're going to 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. Then we just tighten with a wrench and uh wow, that is not going anywhere. Now, we got to do the other side. What's the best way to close this? Now, uh, we really need power. Yeah, I plugged it in. Well, there's no power in the house. Oh, right, right, right, right, right. The whole panel's disconnected. You know what? No, it's 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. Yay, I did. I put it somewhere where there's not going to 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 permanent temperant install. So, I'm going to 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 got to do is twist them together, cap them off either with a morrett 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 cleaned that spot off perfect and stuck it. This adhesive sucks. We're 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 whoop. That took me about 7 minutes and I'd say it's acceptable. Now, all we've got to do is strip two of these ends and then we're going to put them into our tailwind hub here into door one sensor and then common. So, that's just the 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 Jackaryi, 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 nearish the door, leaving enough space around it for obstacle avoidance. And then obviously having it close enough to our jackeri that it's going to be able to charge up our luba. Did I say jacker? Sorry, I meant two of these Blue Yeti AC300's. 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 that way, it's going to know if it accidentally rams into anything. Then on the bottom, we screw on these safety bumpers. As you can see, this unit isn't exactly clean. Uh 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 5400 ft 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 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 hit add lawn mower in the app, it should automatically detect a lawn mower through Bluetooth. Boop. And I helped. Now, the RTK reference station, we don't need that anymore because every single Bimotion 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 set up. 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, etc. 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 a channel. 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 lawn mower for a walk. In case of mistakes, hold the joystick reverse button. Robot will reverse along its previous route. Oh, cute. Okay. 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 LAR 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 uh the last thing I want is this thing trying to mow these. That probably wouldn't go too well for the blades. Mapping successful. Mapping complete. 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 where having that really nice range for the mowing height is going to come in handy for us. So, I'm thinking maybe we go for like 8 cm. Just give it a 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 this 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 freaking 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 stock, 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 Lionus. I got to 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° 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 Motion's AI obstacle avoidance handles them. Will it? Won't it? Will it? Success. Motions 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 uh 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 low 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, Motion. You guys can check out the Luba 3 at the link in the video description. Uh, don't judge the job behind me too much yet. It's not even finished its first run. I just I just shot this outro on the first day.