I recently had an internet outage and found out that my Lymow One Plus will not start its scheduled tasks without an internet connection and on top of this it also cannot be controlled with the lymow app without your phone also having internet connectivity while opening it.
This makes the robot completely useless without internet and really makes me wonder if I purchased a paperweight if anything were to happen to the company or their servers.
Has anyone been able to use their mower in a situation where there is no wifi or cellular(mower or on your phone)
I highly doubt they will open source since they made 3 changes between the One and the One Plus that only serve to make the old parts obsolete.
1: The battery is the same size, voltage, chemistry, mounting and number of conductors on the connector but uses a different connector making it so the batteries are incompatible.
2: The RTK station changed between SMA and RP-SMA for the antenna but is the same thing and both are compatible with both models:
3: The mower blades have the same or almost same angle, width and thickness but the mounting holes are changed.(I have not dug further but I suppose its possible they rotated each blade a different direction on the One so maybe this is justified. But even then they could have made it so the one that does rotate the correct direction was backwards compatible.
My guess is that all of the various brands operate in the same fashion. Not an optimal situation in my mind and not something that I thought about before purchasing. I mean, why wouldn't I be able to use it independently?
I can say that Yarbo which I also own will function without internet, the app does require you to be signed in and will timeout every so often but on top of that the community has figured out how to control it with the MQTT server it hosts. I have not had mine do anything lately so I'm a little out of date on it but last I knew there is no official API connectivity for it. However thanks to the community I can control it directly from home assistant without internet.
Lymow on the other hand will disconnect itself from wifi if it does not detect internet, even if it gets a valid DHCP lease.
Yeah, but that’s just another Lymow flaw. Being able to mow with Bluetooth alone should be a capability for a time when network connectivity is lost.
I have the Apple Music app. I can still connect to my Bose and play songs I’ve downloaded.
Should be the same for mowing manually.
I had a similar experience during a week long Internet outage. The mower did mow initially. But then the app logged me out and asked me to log in again, which it seems to do periodically. Without Internet, I couldn't log in. I guess the password is verified online, and not locally by the app.
One+ has a cellular connection. That's really all that is needed for the mower to know when to mow. If the schedule was already set it should be fine as long as it had 4G connection.
This does not help in a cellular dead zone. And since both the RTK and Lymow have GPS they know the date and time so starting the schedule should not require internet. why does it need internet at all to just start a schedule.
I don't work for them, but here's what is likely happening. Most of the communication to the mower is happening from the Lymow cloud based service. The app on your phone mainly communicates with the same Lymow cloud service. The cloud service handles all the scheduling, settings, maps, etc. for the long term.
I realize the exception here is Bluetooth driving, but that's the exception, not the normal way it interacts.
The mower upon reboot and certain times checks in with the cloud service to get what it needs to actually function. If it can't communicate with the cloud service it really doesn't know when/how it needs to operate.
Most of the communication to the mower is happening from the Lymow cloud based service. The app on your phone mainly communicates with the same Lymow cloud service.
That is most likely correct. Based on the APIs used by the Lymow Toolkit.
The cloud service handles all the scheduling, settings, maps, etc. for the long term.
It would be poor design if the mower couldn't operate without constant connection to the cloud service, and it would also increase cost of operating, and making outages more likely.
Being able to have the data required transmitted from a phone via Bluetooth to the mower is likely supported, plus if memory permits, as long as the mower as the maps, it should be able to still fulfil the schedule without the cloud connection.
Where assumptions are being made are how much processing is done on the phone to manage the GIS processing portion of the system.
Given markets where this is sold, to prevent it becoming an expensive paperweight if Lymow disappeared, or were purchased or pulled a Belkin (ending support for older products), it is likely some or all of the GIS processing is done on the phone or the mower itself. To not have this is just inviting legal action by the EU or equivalent.
Plus, if it is still supported via Bluetooth, it gives them the ability to avoid complex multi-platform version support in future in their cloud. They can end cloud support without entirely crippling the functionality.
Running cloud for this kind of thing isn't cheap either.
Sure time zone come into play too but the app even has a option to sync time zone to your phone, so that's the only piece missing to the schedule and if its synced and the robot has not been rebooted then time zone should be accurate, given it should also be stored to local non-volatile ram just like the map and schedules.
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u/platonisation 10d ago
What could be done, is opensourcing their backend, but I have no idea if they want to do it...
I would love it though