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Mowing the Lawn With Lasers, For Science [Hackaday]
Wouldn’t it be cool if you could cut the grass with lasers? Everyone knows that lasers are basically magic, and if you strap a diode laser or two to a lawn mower, it should slice through those pesky blades of grass with zero effort. Cue [Allen Pan]’s video on doing exactly this, demonstrating in the process that we do in fact live in a physics-based universe, and lasers are not magical light sabers that will just slice and dice without effort.
The first attempt to attach two diode lasers in a spinning configuration like the cutting blades on a traditional lawn mower led to the obvious focusing issues (fixed by removing the focusing lenses) and short contact time. Effectively, while these diode lasers can cut blades of grass, you need to give them some time to do the work. Naturally, this meant adding more lasers in a stationary grid, like creating a Resident Evil-style cutting grid, only for grass instead of intruders.
Does this work? Sort of. Especially thick grass has a lot of moisture in it, which the lasers have to boil off before they can do the cutting. As [Allen] and co-conspirator found out, this also risks igniting a lawn fire in especially thick grass. The best attempt to cut the lawn with lasers appears to have been made two years ago by [rctestflight], who used a stationary, 40 watt diode laser sweeping across an area. When placed on a (slowly) moving platform this could cut the lawn in a matter of days, whereas low-tech rapidly spinning blades would need at least a couple of minutes.
Obviously the answer is to toss out those weak diode lasers and get started with kW-level chemical lasers. We’re definitely looking forward to seeing those attempts, and the safety methods required to not turn it into a laser safety PSA.