The mower kept getting stuck in the same corner of a model of a real yard. It turned out to be two bugs stacked on top of each other. The safety gate was right but late, and the plan asked the robot for a move it could never finish. With both fixed, the same lawn went from 11.8% mowed to 99.5%. Also: the project has a new name, Mowlark.
Chris: "I bet I will come up with a few different hardware platforms. Two-wheel drive, four-wheel drive, tank drive, taller, shorter, wider." A review of the code found the robot's size written out in at least six places, two wheel joints hard-coded, sensing windows sized for one body, one blade assumed everywhere, and no way to tell the simulator which robot to run. So we fixed all of it the practical way: by designing five more robots and making the whole stack run each of them.
Chris read the new front page and asked three things. Some prices looked like pounds. Could the devlog have an RSS feed? And are we building on the OpenMower board, or designing our own?
Chris's feedback on the public site: the styling and tone are right, but it's very tech-forward. The first thing a visitor met was a canvas of stripes labelled "RTK FIXED" and "300 rad/s". Good if you already care, but no help if you don't. So the site now has two layers: a plain-language front page that says what the robot is for, what the goals are and what they cost, and all the detail one click behind it on How it works.
Four smaller jobs: the ROS graph documentation, the GNSS static test for gate 1, build records in Elasticsearch, and a written plan for Phase 5 (perception), which is now up for review before any of it is built.
The brief was "a really slick mower", plus electrical diagrams, a circuit-board plan, software architecture, mechanical drawings and renders. Here's how a software project designs hardware: everything is generated from code, and the drawings check themselves.
Chris went to watch TV and left one instruction: keep going. Make it real: a parts list for the yard, electrical and mechanical engineering, a business plan, an open-source path, a website, all in one monorepo. Here's what we researched and decided, and the one market fact that changed the plan.
The project started with a disappearance. Chris had a Claude Code Remote Control session open on the Windows/WSL laptop, driven from a phone. Then it was gone.