A question for Lymow—is a proper reset function really that hard to implement?
Apart from a few software issues and minor hardware glitches (e.g., the broken springs on the Omni Wheels), I really like my Lymow One Plus. In the less than a month it’s been here, it’s managed to conquer the roughly 8,000 square meters of truly complicated lawn—with plenty of molehills, vole tunnels, branches, lots of bushes, and some areas covered by tall trees—and has already saved me a lot of work.
The only thing that really bothers me is that, due to some software issues, I’ve repeatedly been forced to restart the mower, disconnect the battery, wait a long time, and then hope that the mowing process will resume smoothly after this “babysitting” session. In the sources I’ve found so far, I’ve come across a wide variety of instructions on how to perform such a reset after software issues. Starting with power off/power on, to disconnecting the battery (instructions for the duration vary from a few seconds to hours and days), restarting the mower multiple times (I’ve read 2 to 10 times)—though there are also mentions of button combinations with the Home button held down and not held down.
From my (perhaps somewhat naive) perspective, the following options would be feasible for the existing model, i.e., without adding additional hardware buttons or anything like that:
- An officially documented key combination by Lymow that triggers a clean reset or reboot. This could also be activated only after entering a PIN on the PIN-protected screen.
- A way to initiate a clean reset or reboot from within the app.
- A way to connect the smartphone on which the app is installed via a USB-C cable to the USB-C port already built into the Lymow and then perform a clean reset or reboot. This option in particular would be great for my Lymow right now, since after an aborted software update to the .46 firmware, it is unfortunately no longer accessible via Wi-Fi, 4G, or Bluetooth.
Since "Mowzilla" was stuck in an ota_ing... loop last week and tried every conceivable approach to escape it, I believe that a clean reset/reboot function—however it is implemented—could solve many problems, reduce user frustration, and likely even drastically reduce the volume of support tickets at Lymow Support.