If you live in snow country and own a home, you either have a snowblower or wish you did. The alternatives are either an expensive and potentially unreliable plow service, or back-breaking (and heart-attack inducing) shoveling. [RCLifeOn] was one of those people in the second category, until he decided to do something about it: electrifying a scrap snowblower with a blown engine.
The usual brushless DC motors and electronic speed controllers [RCLifeOn] has on hand to get his R/C life on with don’t quite have enough oomph to handle both functions of a snowblower. For those of you cursed to live in warmer climes, the modern snowblower is both self-propelled via its twin wheels, and generally has a two-stage powered snow-removal “blower” consisting of an auger to break up the snow and an impeller to blast it out of the machine and many meters off the driveway. On the traditional gas-powered models, these are both powered via belts off the same motor, but that wasn’t going to work.
He kept the belts, and simply used a pair of motors, each with their own ESCs that are controlled via oversized thumb wheels on the handles. The belts couple to the motors with 3D printed pulleys. Belt tension is achieved in the case of the wheels through a simple and sensible shimming arrangement. In the case of the blower motor, he uses a 3D printed adjustable mount to get the appropriate tension. To help it hold long-term (given the issues with creep in 3D prints) he’s got a bearing on a second mount opposite the motor. It holds up for his demo, which consists of clearing a driveway of 10cm of snow and then plowing through a pile larger than the mouth of the machine. In other words: it works.
The build, as unfortunately common on YouTube, is shy on specific details– but in this case that’s fine. Even if he’d open-sourced everything and posted STEP or STL files, it wouldn’t save much time since you’d pretty well have to re-engineer the build to fit your own snowblower, if you were so inclined. As with many hacks of this nature, the point of sharing it is to show how easy it is and provide the inspiration. As the cartoons used to say, “knowing is half the battle.”
If one was to re-implement this hack, we could not encourage you strongly enough to put in the standard dead-man’s switch, a feature commercial snowblowers share with things like lawnmowers. As annoying as it is to hang onto with frozen fingers, that safety feature is there for a reason.
If your driveway is short, you can save on gas and fuel costs with an extension cord. Or you could just stay inside and do the job by remote control, but that comes with its own pitfalls.
Continue reading “Electric Snowblower Clears The Way With Hobby Parts” →
ESPectre is an ESP32-based open source motion detector that detects movement without any cameras or microphones. It works similarly to millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar motion detectors in the sense that when a person moves, wireless signals are altered slightly as a result. ESPectre can detect this disturbance by watching and analyzing the Wi-Fi channel state information (CSI) and doing some very smart math and filtering. It’s cheap, easy to deploy and use, and even integrates with Home Assistant.
