Hasta La Ideas

Until iRobot invents a grass-cutting drone, there’s this guy. An anonymous Brit has hacked up, using nothing more than a rope, a pole and of course his lawnmower, a semi-autonomous way to cut his lawn (at least, a large circular portion of it):

The genius of it is that the rope of course shortens slightly with each circumnavigation of the pole, bringing the lawnmower slightly closer to the center with each pass. “The perimeter of the pole is 8 inches or roughly 1/3rd the mower blade width,” writes the mystery inventor. “It does three passes per patch of grass.”

By “perimeter,” do you reckon he means circumference? In any case, commenter response has been mostly positive, and some have pointed out that a pole with a larger diameter would cause the mower to spiral in quicker, reducing the overall time; another pointing out that using two poles could also be used to reduce the mowing overlap, though I think that would present its own set of challenges; at least one reader dubbed the inventor a “genius,” but our favorite comment has got to be: “Nice to know England has redneck engineers too.”

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