Our 1st Snow here at Lake Tahoe and nothing but failures all around.
• No traction in 2” of wet snow. Slipping and sliding, going no
• Continually clogs up even with chute shield removed
• Had to remove safety grate
• Continual Weak Sat issues sometime 15 mostly 20
• Could not connect remote even after restarting rover
• Continual Network Issue errors even when diagnostics say healthy
• Continual GPS signal delays
• In Manual mode response of Rover is delayed (keeps moving when then fingers removed from app)
I’m $5k into this and I can’t use it. I’ve never experience so many technical problems as I have with piece of @$3sb. Thank God I still have my Ariens Kraken. It made quick work of this sierra cement.
Hello. Sorry your first impression wasn’t the best, but hopefully we can help you get things up and running soon. This is a good community, and there is always someone here that will have good ideas on how to resolve the most obscure problems.
So my first thought… Prior to today’s snow, did you run any dry run type tests of your Yarbo? When you mapped the driveway areas, did you run into any issues with GPS and signal quality?
I’m going to make a guess and say you have the WiFi enabled on your Yarbo. It’s the logical thing to do. But in reality, it’s best left off. Yarbo ideally should get its network connectivity via the DataCenter signal. When WiFi is enabled, it tends to cause sporadic issues similar to what you are describing.
Yes, for wet snow the safety fence needs to be removed, because otherwise the snow can’t get through it. Most users remove that thing on day 1 and don’t look back (myself included).
I’m curious about the lack of traction. I’m assuming you are using the winter tank tracks, right? What is your driveway surface? Maybe you have the auger too low for the surface and it’s scraping the driveway so hard that Yarbo can’t effectively overcome the friction?
Let us know what you’ve got going on, and we’ll do what we can to help.
It’s a simple issue to fix, unfortunately it’s design flaw. Theres not enough clearance for the under belly of the core. And weight is the second component.
While these units are quite heavy they are not as heavy as their non automated gas counterpart. This helps for wet snow.
I was thinking about 3D printing some weight holders that would fit in between the handles of the core unit. I think it should help a bit
Yes I have studded belts on. I knew when I was considering purchase that we have a lot of Sierra cement but there are a number of YouTube video’s that herald the Yarbo’s ability to deal with wet snow. I can’t tell you how embarrassing it was to watch my rover not to be able to move in this wet snow. The belts just spin. We physically move the unit to the charging station but it was not able to stay the course, slipping and spinning off the station. For point on reference my drive way is stone pavers. The height of the thrower is set at .14 I have tried a higher setting with same belt spinning. Auger is set to Power mode and even that clogs the throw.
I am a heat seeker and I feel like a jerk falling for the hype on YouTube. Maybe you all can help me out of this hole.
Also, I did use my map successfully with the blower attached to clean my drive way of pine needles.
However, I continually have GPS issues. My data center has a clear view of around 20 Sats. Today with the cloud cover the lowest number was 15 sats. The rover was placed along way from its real position number of time.
I was not aware that you could turn off wifi. I have deleted my wifi connections and will experiment again tomorrow.
Hi there, I’m really sorry to hear about the issues you’re experiencing, and I understand how frustrating this must be—especially with your first snowfall.
Regarding the traction issue, wet snow can be particularly challenging. Some users have found that adding extra weight to the unit can help improve traction in these conditions, so that may be worth trying.
As for the GPS issues, I checked our system and see that you already have a support ticket open related to this. Could you please update that ticket with the latest details? This will help our support team investigate further and work toward a solution.
Thanks for sharing your experience, and we appreciate your patience while we work with you to get things sorted out.
So I checked out the video from Yarbo and a 2nd one. The Yarbo video was very confusing. The 2nd video was clear the u on the belt should point or open to the rear of the rover.
That’s the way I installed them so they were always facing the right way and we still had a ton of slippage on the wet snow.
RTK also uses a data stream and by default it streams the correction data from the data center to Yarbo’s servers. The core receives this data from the server over its network connection. If WiFi drops or is poor, it can cause a “loss of GPS” situation. Consistent disconnects of WiFi can also cause HaLow to disconnect and need to reboot the DC. When this happens and if WiFi is poor, it will fail over to cellular (if enabled) but that can run out of data eventually. HaLow works at a lower frequency than WiFi and has longer range. Just better to not use your home WIFi unless HaLow is having an issue or support asks you to connect it. Also, total satellites isn’t really the number to pay attention to. It’s total L2 satellites. Yarbo uses those more accurate ones. You can see that in your diagnostics. You want at least 10. It can work with less, but ideally 10+ is best.
Also, I’d consider removing the ice studs. They will scratch hard surfaces and really are only needed for ice packs. I think they can make traction worse in non-icing situations.
I was just going to suggest trying that too. If there’s snowpack or ice they might help, but I think if you get to the asphalt the rubber might get more traction.
So today was a happy day. I sent Yarbo out and had no problems. No slippage (guessing it’s the drier snow) and dropping the WiFi connection seemed to cure the Sat and network issues.
She complete 70% of the work made it back to chragimg station @ 20% charge and returned to finish the job when she was at 80% charge.
Absolutely a big disappointment. I bought mine last year. In NOvember. Didn’t get it til march between seasons. So didn’t actually use it until June when the lawn was ready to be cut. The core broke within two weeks. They replaced it. That replacement broke. They replaced that. It broke too. Same issues. Battery wouldn’t charge. BY time I got working replacement summer over. Winter hits. First snow fall. First minus degree celsius weather. Chute freezes. Needs to be taken inside. It works after its warmed up. It was only minus 2 then. Worked for few more times. Then we got really cold weather. Minus 10 celsius. Actually thats normal. Weather next two weeks minus 15ish. Chute froze. Warmed it up inside. While doing it. Battery froze. Took half hour to thaw. CHute froze waiting for battery to thaw. Then auger froze. Then map disconnected. Wouldnt’ start because despite being on charging station. it said, out of map area. Even when moving into map area.. says out of map area. APp also shows chute at minus 10 celsius. Still frozen. Wont’ move. We completely dried it. Removed all moisture. BOught the flawed yarbo snowblower module cover inside, that ripped during the auger auto movement that snagged it, and made sure all moisture out. No ice water or snow. And take it outside.. and it froze… to what? There was no moisture.. nothing. And now I’m waiting for china to wake up at night, when I sleep.. so they can fix it. Still not fixed. They sent mulitple emails creating tickets. telling me there is no refund.. telling me to go sell it on this site.. to lie about how it works in winter.. like they lied how it works in winter.. or keep it and make them fix it. So each day Im’ going to post here until its fixed. If they want me to lose 10k buying a machine they lied about working in winter.. then I can do my best to inform the public about the truth of this machine so they don’t get ripped off like I did.
One quiet comfort is knowing that should my Yarbo rise up against me and take over me like most robotic AI machines are expected to.. I know it won’t even be able to know where the map is.. nevermind finding me and enslaving me.
