comments:
Sure. The box is a typical outdoor storage box used on decks or poolside to hold "stuff". It measures about 4 feet wide by 2 feet deep by 2 feet tall. Very similar to this one on Amazon https://www.amazon.com//dp/B0D1JYKC61 except I bought mine as a "scratch and dent" from Walmart for just $40. As it happened, the damage was a crack on the front face -- and so I made that the place where I cut my opening. After experimenting with some boards around the docking station to get a feel for how wide the Luba truly needed to back in reliably, I cut the opening about 3" wider than the Luba's widest bumper dimension -- and you could actually get away with just 2" wider (1" on each side), as I've found it to be very accurate when backing in. My box sits against my back fence, so I've screwed it onto the fence to protect it against high winds. And I ran underground conduit from the box to my shed -- about 20 feet away -- for the power supply. The power supply "brick" sits dry on a shelf in the shed; I extended the wire to the dock with some 16GA wire. I installed two solar-powered fans on each end (one blowing onto the battery area of the Luba as its charging, the other exhausting out the other end for cross-flow. This keeps things reasonably cool inside as the box bakes in the Florida sun. When I cut the opening in the front of the box, I cut just the two sides and bottom, and then used a heat gun to allow me to flex the cut-out part to form a roof, which was braced by two side pieces (made from some scrap cement board I had lying around). Later, I decided to extend the roof more and make it sturdier with a junk piece of galvanized steel that I also had lying around, as shown in the photo. In hindsight, I should have used a piece of sturdy plastic instead, as the steel roof can block satellite and WiFi reception into the box when the Luba is docked there ... though this hasn't proven to be a problem. I braced the inside and ouside of the cut-out area with some thin wood strips, screwed to each other (outside screwed to inside) through the plastic around the perimeter. The wood also provides a means to screw on the side pieces. All pretty hacked up but it protects the Luba well, and was quite cheap and easy to make. Oh, I already had a wide concrete sidewalk area as a path to my vegetable garden behind, and this provides a convenient spot in front of the box for the Luba to exit and do its "spins" to start mowing and when parking back into the doc.