Two items to share.
My first "EV" is an electric conversion lawn tractor. It came to me
with a bad engine.
I put in a 2kwh Chevy Volt battery, contactor, and electric motor.
At the time, it cost me about what a new gas lawn tractor would have,
and it mows for about 20 minutes before the battery needs a recharge.
That's enough to do half of my yard (front or rear) on a charge, and it
takes a month to make passes through my ~2 acres of field and get
through it.
On the plus side, when I put the snow plow on for the winter, it starts
every time.
That was fun, but my latest project is a powered wheel chair, minus the
chair, plus a hitch, with a towed reel mower.
Remote control with the dual drive / tank steer power chair makes for
wavy lines, but it works.
I use a Pixhawk flight controller. I have upgraded it with an RTK GPS,
with the intention of centimeter accuracy from the GPS so I can
preprogram the route to avoid trees and other obstacles.
Sonar adds extra obstacle avoidance for things that mysteriously appear
on my route - the kids balls, small animals, whatever else the wind
blows through.
I didn't want to bury boundary wires, and I have another property with
several acres to mow and a second power chair.
Now that spring approaches in Montana, I need to get back to that
project - my initial installation had problems with the compass being
too close to the drive motors - it liked to "toilet bowl" a lot to find
its heading, which was hard on the trailer tongue -, and I have a
dual-frequency RTK GPS to install to replace the single frequency for
more accuracy and faster fix.
Unattended charging will be the next problem. 40w of solar onboard needs
a week or so to recharge.
It is interesting to see how many miles you have to drive to mow an acre
or three when you're making 12" cuts with each pass, then compare that
with the range provided by the batteries..
-Tom
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