I got the mower deck installed this afternoon. I finally have a robot mower! I chose not to install the mower blades for the time being. I figure now is a really bad time to end up in a hospital, and I can still test the motor functionality without them.
I was worried that there wouldn’t be much clearance between the deck and the front swivel casters and that the front motor would interfere with the battery bay. The clearances in these areas were pretty tight in the CAD model and I was expecting some variance in the parts. Everything fit together pretty well though.
One thing didn’t though:
I incorrectly sized the cable glands for the mower deck motor cables. I could barley cram both cables through the gland without the bushing. But after some finagling I was able to get it squeezed through there.
I picked the smaller size on purpose thinking it would be tough to get the bushing to seal around two cables. The two wires are 0.18in diameter with the insulation, which means I should have used a 0.375in ID bushing.
But plugging that size cable gland into the CAD model looked pretty ridiculous with lots of empty space in the bushing on both sides of the two cables. So I undersized it, and here we are. Lesson learned: your CAD model can be deceptive when dealing with flexible materials.
The turnbuckles worked pretty slick for leveling the mower deck. You could pretty easily get your fingers in there to rotate them and adjust things. Getting the deck mounted though was a two person job. I had to ask Mrs. Mower for help. Once you have one of the rear turnbuckles attached the rest is pretty easy.
Unfortunately, the deck does still sway a little when driving the robot around. Nothing terrible, but not perfect either. I think I will try to make a custom turnbuckle for the front deck attach point. There’s a lot of motion at the joint between the turnbuckle and the linkage.
Now for the hard part: making it autonomous.
The Mower Project 