Just how much do we want to budget for a production Mowbot and charger?
How much do you pay your biobot? Say 4 UKP per week for the growing
season of 20 weeks; that's 80 UKP per year. Over 5 years that's 400 UKP
($600). That's about my own expectation of cost too. I propose this
as an upper limit on the budget.
Assuming we regard the software as free, that leaves the six Mowbot
hardware categories:
control, movement, sensors, effectors, power, chassis
plus the external recharging station with its expensive solar cells
makes 7. We should also keep some money back as a contingency allowance.
As a rough approximation, let's just divide the budget equally and
see how it looks. So each of the 7 categories gets about 50 UKP ($75)
with an extra 50 UKP spare. Is that reasonable?
I think it is. We probably won't need quite so much for sensors
or chassis but more for movement, but on the whole I think that's a
reasonable approximation of costs.
Robin.
-- R.M.O'Leary <robin nospam at acm.org> +44 973 310035 P.O. Box 20, Swansea SA2 8YB, U.K.