Just a factual review of first use in new england are with our typical mix of snow, wet, then ice.
Driveway: Elevations, windy and about 1/8 mile long; “hard mode” for this unit.
Issues:
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During a storm no GPS leads to snowblower going trailblazing; this cost me about 4 shear pins. Slip collar would be alot nicer with shear pins as last resort. Boundary mishaps should disable auger instead of leaving on and finding rocks.
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Track slipping / using snow treads. Even slight slope and it gets stuck, the issue is a couple items
a. Has no adjustment on auger clearance; angles go up vs angles going down change quite a bit; causing auger to be too high going downhill and too low and ramming into driveway going up. Just have to adjust to .45 inches or so.
b. Clearance; constantly bottom out; even slight slope and it gets stuck. Going try putting big old spikes on tires to get chassis off ground a bit more.
c. Counterweight and elevations; unit has tipping issues due to being too heavy in front.
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Docking; no vision or yolo (assuming); fails 9 out of 10 times. Watched it basically be 3 inches off each time; restart; looped for 15mins or so before i manully drove it up. Going guess the storm and GPS not helping.
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Front grill; basically became a snowplow in slushy snow; had to remove. Even then it fails in slush completely. Just got stuck and pushed around the slush. Gave up at this point and used tractor and snowplow (this was after 6 hours of trying to get yarbo to work).
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Biggest issue: Pathing and closed API…
The pathing is terrible for anything not a square postage stamp. Allowing us to download and modify would be huge. json, xml, yaml = we don’t care what; could have a simple UI built in hours to modify pathing maps manually. While most don’t understand coordinate systems; even just doing a map match and zooming would be a huge improvement. Driving around manually for editing maps, no go zones and rest is beyond painful and a horrible user experience.
The windy driveway makes the pathing go nuts; i just want lines going up an down driveway (tried all 3 modes).
Highly suggest either opening API for mapping or focus on this feature in DEV land. This is going kill the product as soon as a competitor adds this feature (lymow is much closer).
- The smart vision; great feature; would be even nicer if we could use to map; making the above a bit less painful.
Overall; probably works great for urbanville postage stamp driveways that are small rectangles with no real elevations. Rural driveways = I’d stay away until it improves.
Gravel = stay far away, don’t even try unless you have stock in shear pins.