🤖Woebot (part 1)
The 4-digit chasm between robot ownership and sovereignty
This last week has yanked off my rose-tinted futurist glasses with a jolt….
After sharing robot-video after robot-video for the last few years in my newsletter, chronicling how the devices are getting faster, more agile, stronger and *smarter* every week…. it was about time I owned my first robot.
Here’s a cathartic journal of my experience… TLDR: it’s not going very well so far...
Backstory
After I got home to Aotearoa New Zealand from my European travels a month ago, the lawn was in a right state… Spring had sprung here in Ōtautahi Christchurch, and the grass was approaching shin height having only been trimmed a couple of times through winter. Time to drag out the old petrol lawnmower for one more season and lug it up and down the section, stopping every couple of minutes to empty out the cuttings as it clogged up.
Not my idea of time well spent.
(We used to employ the lad around the corner to mow the lawn for NZ$30 every couple of weeks or so… he did an awesome, reliable job for years. But eventually he grew up, graduated and became a professional engineer… and we never got around to re-hiring.)
On my shopping list for quite a while has been “Robot Lawnmower” … I’ve been tracking this technology for years but the economics have never quite worked. Previously the entry-level models were up around $NZ3-4000, which was just prohibitive. However, after this turn around the lawn took >3 hours out of my Saturday that I’ll never get back, I went back to take another look.
Purchasing
As of October 2025, the entry-level price for a robomower (with enough battery to cover our ~900m2 of lawn) had been slashed to NZ$1100. Right at the top of Google search results (paid and organic) — plus many of the other AI answer engines I tried — was the Moebot S10, exclusively sold throughout Australia and New Zealand by Australian company Robot My Life, which looks like a utilitarian, bright orange garden droid:
This was the best-priced model available by far (except for the usual Temu / AliExpress “bargains” which you’d expect no warranty support for…)
I did a bit more research (apparently not enough)… the Robot My Life website claimed very positive ratings on “Reviews.io” AND a 2 year warranty.!
(More on that later…). Reviews for the device (Note: NOT the merchant) I could find around the internet were generally positive, for example, Google’s AI overview doesn’t highlight the bit around customer service:
Finally, I also looked deeper to the company’s websites FAQs and YouTube channel which was encouraging as it included lots of self-support / troubleshooting tips and actively showed robot owners how to configure and fix issues with their own device.
There’s support if I need it, right?
“Our support team is available Mon - Friday, via live chat or by calling. We suggest using the knowledge base first before contacting support. In many circumstances the answer to your query will be in the Knowledge Base. You can access the knowledge base by clicking the ‘More FAQ’ link below. Our direct contact details are also located there.”
Looks pretty great, right? I quickly did the maths:
And so that Saturday afternoon, 0% beer in hand, I typed in my credit card to the RobotMyLife.co.nz website and looked forward to never having to mow the lawn ever again…
Oh, sweet summer child…
The wait
First amber light that things might not go so well was how long the device took to arrive… although it was “shipping” via Aramex from Melbourne, there was a weird tracking link change and it took over 18 days to arrive here across the ditch to Christchurch, NZ. (Free shipping is slow shipping I guess...) During this time I put a support ticket in via RobotMyLife’s website querying why the package was taking so long to arrive - and didn’t hear anything back for another 6 days:
“I’m really sorry for the inconvenience and the delayed response. I checked the tracking and it shwos (sic) that your order is now out for delivery. Please see the tracking image below.“
(Helpful enough I guess… but I’d been hitting “refresh” on that tracking site saying “out for delivery” for nearly a week now…)
Anyway, finally next morning a big cardboard box arrived with a bright orange Moebot inside it… happy days!
User error
So eager to get my mower up and running was I that I took it out of the box, switched it on, set the PIN (actually a four-letter combination ABCD code), checked everything appeared to be working, then put it back in the box to set up later.
Rookie mistake: I didn’t write the PIN down. Oops.
Late afternoon, after I’d cleared the decks from work, I sat down with a cup of tea and the manual and followed the instructions to lay out the guide wire around the perimeter of the lawn. Actually, it only took about an hour going both clockwise and anticlockwise, needing to pinch together both ends using a connector and wire into the docking station. After a bit of fiddling, the blue light on the docking station came on. This means we’re ready to go!
Stuck in a loop
But then I docked the mower, switched it on, typed in the PIN I remembered setting…. and got a “Wrong PIN” message. Oh. Typed it in again: “Wrong PIN”. And again. “Waiting 15 Secs…”. Countdown 15 seconds. Hmmm. Maybe it was another PIN… typed that in… “Wrong PIN. Waiting 30 Secs for Reset…”. Hmmm weird. Maybe it was this one… typed it in … “Wrong PIN. Waiting 60 Secs for Reset”… You can see where this is going
…oh bugger. (Even worse, I found out later, the mower switches itself off after about 5 minutes… meaning the countdown stops until it’s switched on again…)
Never mind, user error, I’ll just reset the device to factory settings. Where’s the manual….:
Narrator: At this point, after spending another hour searching through support forums, he discovered that he can’t do a factory reset on the device he owns… without contacting the vendor’s support desk.
Checked through the support FAQs online… yup, no way to do a factory reset without contacting support. Never mind, Robot My Life will help, remember:
“Our support team is available Mon - Friday, via live chat or by calling. “
I called the phone number: auto response message, please enter a ticket via the website. Looked for live chat … nowhere to be found.
So I logged a support issue online and waited for a response… an AI bot pinged me back requesting more details (Serial number, order no etc) … which I provided.
And then I waited…. and *waited*…. I pinged the ticket a few times: “Any updates?” … “Urgently need help” …. NOTHING.
This is where my mood started getting darker, as I delved deeper into the online reviews for Robot My Life (the company, as opposed to Moebot the device). Oh no…
…It was looking increasingly like I had a NZ$1100 bright orange plastic brick.
The solution when it came
Trying to find a solution sucked up all my spare time last week and then some… Things I investigated:
I kept working my way through a list of various PIN combinations I thought I might have entered on setup - eventually the Moebot got up to 15,000 seconds (5 hours) timeout… which was painful powering it on again every ~5mins to count down. Brute forcing this is NOT the way.
I found out that it’s quite simple to disassemble the mower and remove the PCB circuit board battery out to reset volatile memory settings… in fact Robot My Life actually show you how to do this. However, going deeper asking various AI tools indicated that PIN is likely stored in EEPROM (permanent memory) and so this wouldn’t fix it. Useful knowledge anyway…
I investigated deeper and deeper into the company Robot My Life: unfortunately all this did was reinforce that the company is actually well known for its extremely poor customer support and failure to respond to / honour warranty claims. (More woeful customer forum comments here on Trustpilot: robotmylife.com.au Reviews | Read Customer Service Reviews of robotmylife.com.au)
Contacting robotlawnmowers.com.au in Brisbane who were advertising an out-of-stock Moebot PCB motherboard … unfortunately they weren’t able to help but *offered their sympathies* for my customer service experience with Robot My Life.
AI research reports to try to find a solution deep in user forums / support. Here’s a very helpful Google Gemini Deep Research report which gave me lots of (ultimately dead-end) paths to follow, including identifying the Moebot OEM (Sunseeker Tech in China) and suggestions to contact them for support. Prompt:
“Do an extensive internet search and find out how to reset the robot lawnmower model “Moebot” S10 (or S5 or S20 model) back to factory settings IF the owner does not know the PIN. (The owner legitimately owns it but has been locked out of the device by entering the wrong PIN and now cannot get technical warranty support from the merchant “Robot My Life” based in Melbourne). Make sure you search for customer forums for solutions. It would be good to know who the OEM is so go really deep there. Also is there a way to swap out the PCB as a last resort? If so where can I source a new PCB?“
(Incidentally, it appears that the PIN lockout design decision is made by Sunseeker, not Robot My Life…)
Escalating to the CEO … in the end the one thing which worked was old-school social ape-reputation-status hacking: I found Robot My Life Owner and CEO Glenn Yee’s contact details and emailed him directly on Saturday evening telling him I was brewing this syndicated post and did he want to comment? Literally within an hour the General Manager was phoning and emailing me with a simple fix: a master PIN which unlocked the device and allowed me to factory reset. My feedback:
“Ok I tried that code and it gets me into the main menu, from where I could factory reset and enter a new PIN.
That was all I needed, a real shame it’s taken so much stress and time to get here. I don’t know what’s going on at your end but that’s as bad a support experience as I’ve ever experienced from a firm that isn’t a scam.
Thanks for solving it anyway. Will set the moebot working tomorrow and any more issues I’ll raise another ticket.
Meanwhile you and your team should really focus on improving your customer service... The devices seem fine but your reputation in the market is really getting dragged down by the customer support experience.”
Since I put my ticket in last Wednesday and another one on Saturday, there were over 300 new tickets created. None of my tickets were closed
Scorecard so far
So, my time- and money-saving device is currently anything but:
Money spent: NZ$1100 + $25 for old lawnmower oil
Time spent: Another 2.5 hours manually mowing the lawns again, around 14 hours installing, troubleshooting and researching solutions.
And we’re not finished yet…
Bigger picture: robot sovereignty
Regular readers of the Memia newsletter will know I’m a vocal advocate for digital sovereignty at every level: data, internet, cloud, software and hardware. Generally speaking, most consumer hardware allows a factory reset out of the box… (I know Apple devices provide the option for users to lock their hardware through iCloud, but that’s pretty much the only example I know of.) So I was a bit perplexed at this design decision: basically the owner of a consumer device is locked out and can’t reset their device to factory settings without contacting the (re)seller of that device. In all my time in tech, I’ve rarely come across this in consumer electronics. (I have heard tales of various types of commercial and agricultural machinery, together with cars, needing to be taken to an authorised service engineer… but never consumer electronics.)
I can see that it’s intended as a security feature: basically it discourages someone walking onto my lawn, picking up the robot and stealing it and then factory resetting. BUT: it’s MY device. I want to have control of that setting, *THANK YOU VERY MUCH*.
Turns out there’s a 4-digit chasm between robot ownership and sovereignty
Going down a ChatGPT “what are my consumer rights here?” route gave me this answer (take this with a pinch of salt but a useful point in the right direction…):
✅ Your rights under NZ law
Because you’re in NZ and the goods were delivered here, NZ consumer law applies (even though the seller is Australian).
Under the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 (CGA): If the goods are faulty, unsafe, do not match description, or are not fit for purpose, you have the right to reject them and choose a refund or replacement. legislation.govt.nz
The seller cannot simply offer a credit note if you opt for a refund. Consumer NZ
If the fault is “substantial” (i.e., a reasonable consumer wouldn’t have bought had they known, or the product fails to perform its primary function, etc.), you’re strongly entitled to a refund. Sprintlaw NZ
The seller’s “change-of-mind” or “you just don’t like it” doesn’t give you automatic rights to refund. But your case is faulty/unused/unusable goods, so different. consumerprotection.govt.nz
Fundamentally, if I’d have known that the device couldn’t be factory reset without support from a (MIA) support desk in Australia, I definitely wouldn’t have bought it. On this basis of a “substantial” fault, and in the belief that I wouldn’t get support from the merchant… I initiated a dispute via my credit card issuer. I’m not hopeful that I would get an outcome through this channel - likely they don’t want to get involved since the goods arrived apparently OK and it was likely user error forgetting the PIN. But warranty support is warranty support…
(Same issue, bigger playing field this week: Elon Musk’s less-that-subtle comments this week about wanting to have “a strong influence” over Tesla’s Optimus “robot army” …)
All of this has pushed me towards researching open-source robomower projects out there. Turns out there are a few:
Top of the table is the “OpenMower” project, led by German open-source developer @c.ez , providing both hardware and software to retrofit inside an old off-the-shelf robomower chassis:
Added bonus: the OpenMower project supports GPS navigation (not just boundary wire) AND there’s a new Version 2 “universal board” currently being tested. (This will definitely be my go-to option if I can’t get my Moebot to work and I can’t get a warranty … will be a fun (although time-soaking) project if it works…). Here’s a demo of OpenMower 1 in action:
Other notable mentions:
IndyMower:
NathanBuildsDIY:
Ardumower:
So why isn’t everyone 3D-printing their chassis parts and installing their own open-source PCBs… rather than letting themselves get locked in by low-rent resellers…? Beats me.
Coming in Part 2…
More on if / how I manage to fix the “Mower outside” and “Emergency Stop” errors I’m getting after first run around 10 seconds… wish me luck!
OK, thanks for reading, this was pretty cathartic…😮💨