I’ve posted this request before but the response from @Yarbo-Forum was:
“Thanks for sharing this suggestion. I can understand how this would be useful in your situation. At the moment, we do not have plans to support enabling or disabling NGZs per work plan. However, if more users show interest in this feature, we will revisit the idea in future discussions.”
We need the ability to enable/disable No Go Zones per work plan.
I can never just run a plan. I always have to go to a separate menu and toggle NGZ’s off and on. Why make the user go to a separate menu to configure safety settings before running every plan?
Use case: I have a two-car driveway. There could be one (either on the left or right side), two (both the left and right sides) or no cars parked in the driveway. I have three plans, one for each situation. If I’m running ‘Plan Left Side’ that means a car is parked on the right side and I want the NGZ for the car on the right to always be enabled and the NGZ for the car on the left to always be disabled and vice versa. I don’t understand why this isn’t already there. As it stands now if I want to run a plan, I have to remember to check the NGZ’s to see what state they are in. I then have to go into a separate menu to enable/disable the NGZ’s to the states I need them in. This is usually after clicking on ‘Start’ realizing, after looking at the map, that the NGZ’s aren’t configured properly for the plan I want to run. From there you have to click ‘back’, click ‘Edit Map’ find the NGZ’s you want to manage (via the map or list), toggle each of them, click ‘Exit Edit’, and click ‘Start’ again. Now you can run a plan.
Maybe if vehicle avoidance worked this wouldn’t be a requirement but it doesn’t work. Adding this feature has to be easier and more reliable than getting vehicle avoidance to work. None of the vision stuff works or has ever worked for me. Even if vision was working, I would still argue that this feature is required.
This is so frustrating. I don’t understand the reluctance to even consider adding this as a feature. For everyone that is running the S1 and has a family with cars coming in and out of your driveway you will quickly understand why this feature is needed.
Add ability to Enable/Disable NGZ’s per work plan
Yes, it’s a required feature.
No, this guy has no idea what he is talking about.
Could you overlay a map instead of a NGZ over your existing full map? One of the PPP says he does this and just builds a work plan for each area and the overall area if the driveway is clear. I mean I understand your ask, and I feel it’s reasonable, just thought I’d offer the alternative for the interim.
So you have a mapped area now and are blocking portions of it with NGZ’s. Keep that, but go and create a new area map in lieu of each NGZ over top of the existing area map. So let’s so you have left and right and full as separate mapped areas now. Then you could create a work plan called left driveway and only add the left mapped area. Same with right and same with full driveway. Pathways might get a little tricky between them, but I suspect if you map those for each area separately, you’d be ok.
I liked that option but immediately was annoyed at the thought of having to create all the pathways, etc. would be nice if you could run overlapping zones all as 1 zone, etc😅
That’s pretty much what I have now. I also have to do in front of the garage door which covers both sides. I currently do that as two sidewalks. The issue I have is the areas are pretty tight and there are times that the S1 does not completely stay within its designated area, it will rotate outside of it. To compensate for that I narrowed the areas and ran a sidewalk down the middle between the two areas. I want the NGZ as an extra layer of safety so that it doesn’t drive into my truck yet again. If you want I can post a pic of my map when I have time to mark it up.
Yeah I understand your concern. That could definitely pose a problem since it assumes any pathways, sidewalks, areas, etc are safe to use to turn around in. Reference my post about it entering pathways along any point.
However, it should be less of an issue with the S1 since it can only do zero turns and not smart turns. But, if it takes liberties… It also has a big booty and does swing that over the line a lot.
Just curious, have you tried it this year or was that a last year issue you still have PTSD from?
I set up my driveway the way Brian is suggesting, well sort of…
I have a main driveway zone that consists of the areas of the driveway I ALWAYS want to snowblow. This main zone EXcludes the places where my kids park their cars, and the end of the driveway where the snow plow piles on extra snow.
Then I created smaller sub areas that can be individually selected as needed: The spots where the kids park is one sub-zone, and I created a few different work areas for the end of the driveway to hopefully tackle all the snow plow accumulation, while ensuring Yarbo doesn’t throw any snow at oncoming traffic.
This is all theoretical at this point; we haven’t had any snow accumulation yet. Fingers crossed. Hopefully it works as I designed it!
These areas are all new for this year based on what I learned from last year. I changed my entire way of thinking. I’ve run several test runs so far and tweaked them more times than I can count. I would really like to keep the NGZ’s. We havent had much snow so far this year so I haven’t fully tested it. I’m also really concerned about the chute orientation and it honoring snow throw areas. That did not work very well at all last year.
As everyone is aware we are expecting some snow this week and Lake Erie hasn’t frozen over yet. Winter in Buffalo can be an itch on a bee until the lake freezes over. After that its not so bad, relatively speaking.
Agreed. This is supposed to be their most mature product. I can see it working mostly fine for doing large parking lots, with no cars, or very long and wide driveways. I keep struggling with my suburban two car driveway.
The biggest issue is the snow throw direction. You define snow throw areas but it doesn’t honor them. Sometimes it just throws snow wherever it decides to. Also, while it’s adjusting the throw direction it keeps moving forward with the auger engaged so its throwing snow/ice the entire time. This is really problematic while it’s doing the apron because it gets thrown into the street, oncoming traffic. I’ve hit passing cars multiple times. Luckily it was only snow and nobody complained. Last year I ended up baby sitting it and if I saw a car coming I would pause it. If cars are parked in the driveway they get pelted as well.
The other issues revolve around it maneuvering outside of designated areas.
I had some other issues with it getting stuck but I’m not gonna put that on the machine. We already had a few feet of snow when it arrived and it was too much for it to handle. Not it’s fault.
With what I learned last year I think I’ll have better luck but there is still quite a bit of room for improvement. I expected to send it out and do what I would with the Ariens but that is not how this works.
You wil have to go out from time to time with your manual snow blower and clean up certain areas, especially the apron where the plow goes by. That can get pretty thick and heavy.
Thank you for taking the time to share such a detailed explanation of your use case. I completely understand why being able to enable or disable NGZs per work plan would make a significant difference, especially with multiple cars coming and going.
I’ve seen all the interest around this feature, and I will pass your feedback along to our product team. We receive many feature requests, but our development resources are limited, so there are quite a few features we would like to build—even if we aren’t sure yet when they can be included in a release sprint.
Because of that, I don’t want to over-promise on the timeline or guarantee when (or whether) a specific feature will move forward. That said, your request is already on our internal feature list, and it will continue to be revisited. User feedback and the number of voices supporting a feature play an important role in helping us prioritize development.
I really appreciate you initiating the discussion and rallying others to vote on this idea. I’ll make sure your comments—and the interest shown by other users—are shared with our product team.
that you don’t need the snow blower at all this year. 