Welcome to this week’s casual kōrero thread!
This post will be pinned in this community so you can always find it, and will stay for about a week until replaced by the next one.
It’s for talking about anything that might not justify a full post. For example:
- Something interesting that happened to you
- Something humourous that happened to you
- Something frustrating that happened to you
- A quick question
- A request for recommendations
- Pictures of your pet
- A picture of a cloud that kind of looks like an elephant
- Anything else, there are no rules (except the rule)
So how’s it going?
Hopefully will find enough time (and nice weather) to fix the robotic mower’s boundary wire. And by fix I mean rip the whole lot out and replace with the heavy duty wire. It’s done well to last so long, but it’s in too poor condition now for me to bother trying to patch whichever section is corroded.
Then I have to put my fancy new Old Man Mountain front rack on my bicycle and figure out how to mount my light to it.
Is your boundary wire special, e.g. has some power or signal running through it, or do you literally just have wire and the robot uses magnets or some other magic to detect it?
Nothing special, any copper wire should work.
It uses induction - the base station sends a signal around the loop and the mower picks it up with a coil. The signal is inverted when the coil is on the outside of the loop.
Ah, that is the kind of special I meant. So it’s plugged in to a base station sending signals.
You mentioned it’s corroded, so it’s just a bare wire? Or it’s insulated but over time I guess the sun would damage the plastic and air/water would start to get into the wire and corrode it?
Bingo! Ripped out a bunch of it yesterday and found a section of it where insulation has failed for whatever reason and the wire was crumbling to dust.