My buddy went through and cut down a bunch of trees on his property with a chain-saw, and asked me to bring the Lawnbot400 over to clear out the rest. It ran like a champ until we started hitting stumps... then I had to re-start the mower several times. Also I had the deck lowered to cut grass (not bush-hog), so it was not ideal for the terrain but still fun. Driving the Lawnbot400 out there always points out the weakest spots, but it drove home in 1 piece and is ready to go out again, so no complaints.

In late 20009, I submitted the Lawnbot400 as a project for MAKE Magazine. I was surprised when Mark Frauenfelder (the editor-in-chief of MAKE) emailed me back saying they wanted me to write an article for the magazine. So, I painted it and they took some professional photos of it - I thought I would snap a few before it got all dirty again. Look for it in the April issue of MAKE - www.makezine.com.

My best friend got me a PicAxe development board for my birthday, so I took that as a cue to learn the Basic programming language. I learned enough in 1 hour to replicate the same code that took me 8 months to create with the Arduino in the C programming language. Given, that 8 months included some grunt work that would have been included in learning any language, but still... it was pretty easy and has 1/4th the code of the Arduino.

Check it out here.

I finally decided to paint the Lawnbot400 since the angle-iron already had some rust on it and it appears that it will, as hoped, be my primary (only) mower. So I asked my wife to help me pick out colors and came up with a paint-scheme on the fly. I had a favorite motorcycle that was black and yellow... so I decided to go with what I knew. The blue came as a suggestion of my wife, which turned out nice. I had to give props to Jesus Christ since He is the reason I'm here, so you will notice a few emblems on the mower deck.

I looked around at the open source motor controller for the Lawnbot400 before building the Triple8, but initially decided against it because of the $120 each price tag. I then looked at the OSMC bare PCB thinking I would roll my own, but they are $30 each! But since it is a proven design and it surpasses the limitations of my home-built controller with ease, I decided that I wanted one - I just didn't want to pay $240 to make my robot move.

After designing and etching several successful PCB's, I decided that I would use the schematic from the OSMC v3.22 and make a single-sided PCB layout with only through-hole components - no surface mounting and you can etch it at home. Check out the page here.

This was my 4th motor driver board to design and build since I started messing with this project. Let me start by saying that this board doesn't get hot, and since heat is bad for a motor driver, this is really good. I tested it out with 18vdc and it stays cool as ice. I put 24 mosfets on this board as opposed to 8 on the last one. Also, each mosfet has a heatsink and each set of 3 are bolted together to dissipate more heat. The extra weight of the mower deck makes doing zero-turns a little more difficult, but it runs great and I can't complain. Here are more pics: