MowBite

A web app for OpenMower robot mowers. It runs on the mower itself as a small container (about 5 MB) and talks to OpenMower over MQTT, no cloud involved. Works on phones and desktops, and there's an Android app too.

MowBite is a community project and not affiliated with the OpenMower project.

What it does

• Dashboard: what the mower is doing in plain words, battery, the important sensor values, controls, today's runs, and a map that follows the mower while it drives (or always, if you like).
• Map editor: zoom and pan, move, add and delete outline points (with a loupe on touch screens), reduce the points of recorded outlines, split and merge areas, rename areas and change their type, undo. Changes are only sent to the mower when you save. A layer menu hides obstacles, navigation areas, numbers and tracks.
• Map backups: made automatically before every save, and by hand whenever you like. Preview one on the map, restore it, download it or load a map from a file.
• Record areas by driving: a thumb stick drives the mower around a new area, its obstacles and the docking station, with a live preview of what's being recorded. The mower stops as soon as the stick is let go, the app is left or the connection drops.
• Mowing settings per area: outline passes, overlap, offset and mow angle, with a preview of the mowing plan: the outline passes around the area and its obstacles and the stripes inside, worked out like OpenMower's planner does it (including mow_angle_offset). It's an approximation, the order the mower drives the pieces in isn't shown.
• Mowing order of the areas.
• Tracks: the trail of the current mow and of past mows, read from the mower's own history. Driving without blades is drawn dashed.
• Activity: every day's runs from the mower's event history, with the result, the areas, the mowing time and a timeline. Problems come with an explanation, the circumstances and the raw entry from the history file, and can be shown on the map where they happened.
• Aerial imagery under the map, optional: the official open orthophotos of Germany (every state except Saarland), Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Spain, Czechia, Finland and the USA, anywhere else an XYZ or WMS source you add in the settings.
• Sensors with lowest and highest values of the last 24 hours. The container records them, so it doesn't matter whether a browser was open.
• Mowing schedule: days, start times and which areas, the container starts the mower by itself. Optionally not when the rain sensor is wet or rain is forecast for the next one to three hours (Open-Meteo), and it waits for the battery. A start time between 6 pm and 6 am has to be confirmed, hedgehogs and other animals are out then.
• Colors, icons and icon sizes of the map, shared between all your devices.
• More than one mower: add your other mowers in the settings and switch between them at the top of the page.
• Weather for the garden on the dashboard, optional: temperature, sky and whether rain is coming in the next hours, from Open-Meteo.
• Update check, off by default: once a day it asks GitHub for a new release. The Android app then downloads the new version, for the mower it shows the command to update.
• English and German, following the browser or picked per device in the settings.
• Light and dark design, following the device or picked in the settings.

Works with OpenMower v1 and v2 hardware. On phones the pages sit in a tab bar at the bottom, and if you switch it on in the settings you can swipe between them.

Planned

Roughly in this order, nothing promised:

• Mow angle that changes per area after every mow, so the stripes don't always run the same way.
• Blades on while recording an area, behind an extra confirmation.
• More languages, send a translation if you like.

Ideas and wishes are welcome as issues.

Install on the mower

You need a running OpenMower with the MQTT websocket on port 9001, which is the default. On the mower:

mkdir mowbite && cd mowbite
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mkaaaaaay/mowbite/main/compose.yaml
docker compose pull
docker compose up -d

Then open http://<your-mower>:8082. Port 8082 is used because OpenMower already uses 3000 and 8080; change it in compose.yaml if you like. The image is about 5 MB and exists for arm64 (the mower) and amd64.

Build it yourself

git clone https://github.com/mkaaaaaay/mowbite.git
cd mowbite
docker compose up -d --build

Building on the mower needs about 1 GB of free space for a while. If yours is short on space, build on a PC and copy the image over:

docker buildx build --platform linux/arm64 -t ghcr.io/mkaaaaaay/mowbite:latest --load .
docker save ghcr.io/mkaaaaaay/mowbite:latest | ssh openmower@<your-mower> docker load

Versions

latest is the newest release, dev follows the dev branch and might be broken. Every release also gets its own tags, e.g. 1.0.0 and 1.0, if you'd rather stay on one version: change the image in compose.yaml to ghcr.io/mkaaaaaay/mowbite:1.0. The settings page shows which version you have.

Update

cd mowbite
docker compose pull
docker compose up -d

(or git pull and docker compose up -d --build if you build it yourself)

Your settings stay, they live in the settings volume. Reload the page afterwards, phones like to keep the old version for a while.

Remove

cd mowbite
docker compose down -v

-v also deletes the saved settings and the map backups, leave it out to keep them. Nothing else on the mower is touched, MowBite doesn't change any OpenMower files.

Troubleshooting

• "waiting for map..." forever: the browser can't reach MQTT. Check that ws://<your-mower>:9001 is reachable from the device you're using, and set MOWER_MQTT_WS_URL if the app isn't running on the mower.
• No data but the connection works: your OpenMower may use a topic prefix, set MOWER_MQTT_PREFIX.
• Saving the map fails: OpenMower needs to be running (the map is saved through its RPC), and it's best to save while the mower is docked.
• Colors and icons aren't shared between devices: that only works when the app is served by the container, not with npm run dev.

Android app

The same app as an APK, handy on a phone without typing an address into the browser:

• MowBite.apk, the latest release
• MowBite-dev.apk, built from the dev branch, might be broken

Android asks once whether it may install apps from your browser. On the first start the app asks for your mower's address. MowBite has to run on the mower as described above, the app talks to it over your home network. Newer versions install over the old one and keep your settings.

Configuration

The port you open in the browser is the first number under ports in compose.yaml (8082). Change only that one, the 8080 behind it is the port inside the container.

Optional settings go under environment in compose.yaml:

• MOWER_MQTT_WS_URL: where the browser finds OpenMower's MQTT websocket. Without it the app uses ws://<host the app is opened from>:9001, which is right when it runs on the mower.
• MOWER_MQTT_PREFIX: topic prefix, only if your OpenMower uses one.
• MOWER_MQTT_HOST, MOWER_MQTT_PORT (default 1883), MOWER_MQTT_USER, MOWER_MQTT_PASSWORD: the broker the sensor recorder listens to. On the mower it finds it by itself, set these only if the broker runs somewhere else or needs a login.
• MOWBITE_SCHEDULER: set it to off on a second copy of the app (e.g. on a PC), so only the one on the mower starts it by schedule.

Settings made in the app (colors, icons) and the recorded sensor values are stored in the settings volume.

If you run the OpenMower start page, MowBite shows up there by itself (labels in compose.yaml). Change openmower.ui.port too if you change the port.

Development

npm install
echo "NEXT_PUBLIC_MOWER_MQTT_WS_URL=ws://<your-mower>:9001" > .env.local
npm run dev

To open the dev server from a phone, allow its host: DEV_ORIGINS=<pc-name>,<pc-ip> npm run dev -- -H 0.0.0.0.

The Android app is the same build packed with Capacitor. With the Android SDK and a JDK 21 installed:

npm run build
npx cap sync android
cd android && ./gradlew assembleDebug

License

GPL-3.0, see LICENSE.

Built-in aerial imagery comes from the official surveying and mapping agencies under their open data licenses (CC BY 4.0, CC0, dl-de/by-2-0, dl-de/zero-2-0, Etalab 2.0, the Flemish free reuse license, swisstopo's free use terms, US public domain). Finland's comes from the National Land Survey through the servers of Kapsi, a Finnish non-profit (CC BY 4.0. The app shows the required attribution while imagery is on. For a tile source you add yourself, you're responsible for its terms.