How does Yarbo know when it’s raining? Does it have onboard sensors for that, or is it accessing cloud weather?
There is a rainsensor on top of the mower.
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Does it auto resume when it no longer detects rain? Mine was just mowing and it detected it and went to the dock, but it hasn’t rained now for many hours. Do I manually have to resume it, or will it automatically eventually?
I looked at diag data and rain sensor was at like 1300 but its went down and is now sitting at 3, which I noticed is where it sits normally. How long before it resumes?
I figured there may be a delay to let the grass dry some.
There may be a delay, but I am unsure. If you are running a schedule and it’s outside the window this could be a reason why it didn’t resume. I would definitely wait until things have dried up before resuming it.
We had very heavy rain for a couple of hours now. My Yarbo was already mowing using a scheduled work plan. In spite of the heavy rain, it did not return to the docking station. The rain sensor was showing a value of 88 (not sure if this value is too low although it was literally a down pour for a couple of hours). Does anyone know what could prevent Yarbo from returning to the docking station in this case?
The only guess is a dirty sensor. It should return when it reaches 500.
Been pouring a few hours here. My mower’s front half is outside the doghouse. Rain sensor: 220. Highest I’ve ever seen. I guess it would still go out to mow?
This was earlier today. The mower’s wet after overnight rain, the grass is soaked. The sensor? 3.
It really needs a grass moisture sensor, which I threw in a suggestion for.
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Hit it direct with a hose and see if that helps. Seen mine register 600 doing that. @JayWozz says it needs to be clean to register properly. Seems like the threshold should be lowered substantially.
I just called mine back to the charching dock, after it was slipping in pouring rain, sensor shows 310.
I think the sensor is not working right.
I do believe the sensor is working correctly – for itself. To be fair I’ll give it a light clean with some Simple Green when we get a little break in this endless rain, but it really doesn’t matter:
In my picture you’ll see it has dried off while everything around has remained wet. I would not mow in these conditions, yet Yarbo would. You can set whatever threshold you want, but if the sensor is measuring itself and not what you’re mowing, from a customer perspective it is not accurate and not useful.
I suspect Yarbo’s sensor works exactly like my firewood moisture meter, based on resistance. The grid in Yarbo’s sensor I’m guessing are channels to hold on a little bit of moisture to give the grass time to dry, but it may not be sufficient. Things dry quickly in a light breeze, just not grass.
I wonder if a sponge fixed to the top of the sensor would make it more reflective of the grass’s moisture content?
I can probably make a grass sensor with bits of an Arduino kit I have, but there’s no way to tie it into Yarbo, as there is no API available at this time.
Update: Still raining! After cleaning and dousing (and leaving the sensor full of rinse water), the sensor is >2000. When the sensor dries out in 37 days and the dove shows up with the olive leaf, I’ll check the grass. I’ll see if my Mowing Operation Indicator on my Slippers Threshold (MOIST) will be in agreement with the sensor.
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I cleaned the sensor now with a soft brush, then I soaked it in water, it now shows 1670, the little indent and the channels between the two metal tips are filled with water.
Yarbo made quite a mess today on my lawn, slipping around. It needs to get better with rain and moisture detection.
It’s been raining or drizzling/foggy most of the day, but the rain sensor began to drop – perfect time to see what happens.
I watched the sensor value fall below 1500, then its rate of fall seemed to increase through the 1400s and 1300s. I tried running Work Plans – it wouldn’t, because of the rain sensor value. OK, good.
In the 1100s I tried running the Work Plan, and it said no, but it did give me the message about “Your map is complex,” and the App seemed to enjoy sitting and spinning. Why then? No idea.
I could not start a Work Plan until it went under 1000 on that rain sensor value. It went out to run the Work Plan. After several seconds I ended the Work Plan, and the rover came back to recharge. Experiment over.
Well, I have a blue blink now on the Docking Station while the App says Charging. Yeah, could be the “Battery 100%” thing. We’ll see what it looks like in the morning.
The rain sensor went from a little under 1000 to over 1400 during the rover’s brief trip. Interesting, but maybe some water pooled in the sensor during the brief trip off the Docking Station.
The grass? My Trex deck has puddles on it. You couldn’t mow my lawn right now with napalm and a flamethrower.
Bottom lines for me:
- I’m probably still hitting that “100%-but-not-100% battery” bug, as evidenced by the blinking blue light on the Docking Station. Will the blue blink change to a green blink or solid green? We’ll see. Apologies, Yarbo, no Recording. 
- The rain sensor has limited usefulness to me. Maybe it’s useful if I have a Work Plan scheduled so it can be postponed or it’s running a Work Plan and there’s enough rain to send it home, but the threshold is far too high, and the rain sensor doesn’t reflect what’s on the ground, so the mower will only be too happy to mow very wet grass.
Not sure what we do here or ask Yarbo for. Some thoughts:
- Do nothing. It’s fine.
- Adjustable Threshold, even if the sensor is of questionable value.
- Some way to get the moisture of the grass and base the mowing go/no-go decision on that.
- Other…?
I’ll be starting to use the Scheduler, and I’ll just manually turn off jobs if the weather looks bad.
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They already have the weather API for the snow blower. I realize it has it’s issues still, but seems conceivable that they could easily add forecasted rain to the schedule override and use the sensor if the forecast is inaccurate.
I have had the same problem with the docking station flashing blue not green, but each morning Yarbo has been fully charged and ready to work. Sometimes the LED has stayed blue the entire time and other times turned green later in the night. It is still working so I was waiting to see what changes in the next update
@bryan.wheeler - Was thinking that as well, but can you infer the state of your lawn from some general weather information? Snow you can kinda see it getting the latest snowfall totals and going with that (if they’re updated often), not sure about rain. “It rained .25 inches in the last hour” – OK, we’ll say that’s too wet, but how do we then determine when it’s dry enough to mow?
It’s done this for me since October. Totally normal. I believe the blue is it discharging the battery to keep it maintained. Solid green is fully charged, flashing green is charging. As long as it shows charging in the app even if it’s blue, it should be fine.
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My hope would be that would be a user definable setting. Don’t mow for XX amount of hours after accumulated rainfall.
@Rick @bryan.wheeler - Yeah, blue blink should mean “preparing the battery for charging” or something, and I’m just going to let it ride tonight. If the battery’s down, I’ll send the rover out for a short time and have it come back – it fixed it last time. If this is that “100% battery bug” again, I need to get it repro’ed with Record on at some point to let Support know.
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