Inside of a Tractor Cab [video]
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The contractors for whom I originally took over apparently had a contract to write unit tests, probably for a certain amount of test coverage or something. There was a bunch of dead code buried that was only executed by the tests, apparently to bump up their unit test coverage. This was one of many such horrors. We ultimately told management that it was cheaper to rewrite the thing than it was to fix their backlog of "must have" bugfixes, and it was a huge success. Still didn't fix the radio issues, however.
Interesting thing I learned about designing production test equipment. If you show the operator all the nasty state information they quickly learn to associate trashy diagnostic output with corrective action. That janky message means, run it again, it'll pass. This other one means that row of pogo pins needs to be replaced.
I also want to stab embedded developers with a pin header if they ever try to use a touch screen. About the only place a touch screen makes sense and is provably better is your phone. Any other application of a touch screen needs to be eradicated from this planet.
The touch screen UI was well researched and won an award even and I dare say one function regressed because of the touch screen, but that function (manual build plate leveling where you look at the nozzle instead of the screen) you should never need any more because the rest of the machine got better.
- Ticket machines
- Food machines
- Informational kiosks
- Border control machines
Basically whenever you have a public-facing system that's designed to be used for a short period of time, with relatively simple input.
Touchscreens are more accessible than mouse/keyboards, because many people genuinely don't use mouse and keyboards at all. Furthermore, it's a lot easier to keep a touchscreen clean than a mouse and keyboard!
The only advantage of a touchscreen is surprisingly not the ability to touch, but the ability to reconfigure the input interface through software. When you don't need to reconfigure things, encoders, toggles, push buttons, rotary switches, etc. are far superior (with some downsides - cost, reliability).
Ok, here's a simple action, that's often solved by touchscreens - Choose a destination from a ticket machine. Let's start with the button-first approach. Here's what the London Underground ticket machines used to look like:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B96DRJQIIAE_y1n?format=jpg&name=...
Impossible to sort, filter, search, translate, display updates...
Possibly very efficient for people who have memorized the exact locations of their stations. At least, until they have to lookup a new destination.
Virtually unusable for:
* Anyone looking for a new destination (huge search time)
* First time users (huge search time)
* Non-English speakers (Instructions are in English)
And it's:
* Terrifying
* Expensive to design/build
* Expensive to maintain
* Expensive to update
Compare that to the modern interface, and I know which I'd rather use:
https://cromwell-intl.com/travel/uk/london-underground/pictu...
Genuine question - Why do you think so many systems like these touchscreens?
Honestly after my experience in firmware and manufacturing I'm amazed anything every works
I work with software now/currently. I'd be surprised it all works if only it wasn't so frequently clear that it doesn't! I suppose the idea of updates has been quite quickly ingrained in the consumer mind - software bugs are somehow more acceptable, seen as just 'to be fixed' rather than 'broken' or 'poorly made', 'not very robust'.
You get what you measure.
Please take a look at this forum: https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/greenstar-un...
I've seen this trick used before; puff up the code base with just-gotta-work type filler (e.g., adding layers of abstraction and tons of parameter checking and re-checking) in order to hit some code-coverage metric. I mean, who's going to argue about a layer of abstraction, it's an automatic good thing, right? And parameter checking is what separates us from the animals!
Encountering code like this is usually a Bad Sign.
Even a smaller CUT can do an incredible amount of damage in a short period of time.
At least some of this fancy automation stuff helps catch problems like that before they get out of hand; now you just need a John Deere licensed technician to make a service call and reset the fault lockout...
When I asked what the hell happened, he said the auto-steer went out, and by the time he figured out how to even run the planter while it was planting, he was done.
He laughed and said that the biggest problem wasn't the loss in yield, it was that he dropped his psp and broke it.
Ahem:
We are approaching the point at which people who like to play farming simulators can be charged a fee for the privilege of actually farming. Using the same app.
Even Tom Sawyer didn't dare to charge Ben Rogers to whitewash Aunt Polly's fence.
But yeah, what do you do if you have a breakdown or an issue in the machine (like a rock stuck somewhere) that needs fixing? I guess if you look at US large-scale operations (five combines next to one another) you could have one maintenance guy / foreman with five remote operators?
I do think we'll see more of that. I mean there's the jobs depicted on TV (so I don't know if this is actually a thing) of people looking at security cameras, that can be done from home I think. Plenty of FNAF fans that have done that for ages.
But it has to be secure. I mean another remote operator job I can think of is in factories and power plants, but that's really not something you want to be doable over the internet. Even without internet, stuxnet (?) proved you can cause damage in that kind of systems.
Of course if you are in western Europe US farms are big, but there is more to the world than Europe and the US.
But, still similar enough. I run product for a Telematics Platform company that sells into the large enterprise fleets. Have spent a lot of time in cabs of trucks learning about what driver's need and trying to "feel the pains" of being a commercial driver. It's a rough and tough environment, though the new vehicles are pretty damn nice.
Building software systems for things that move and can't really afford any downtime is a great set of challenges that I never would have expected to enjoy. Much less trying to shift paradigms in a legacy-laden industry away from "boxes of software" to a true development platform.
But it's always amusing how far telematics folks will go to avoid certification for SIL-4. The whole telematics industry should just bite the bullet and catch up with, for example, the decades of experience the rail transportation guys have in making all those pieces fit.
Though I wonder how programmable it is, could be a pretty cool automation control panel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjVZoniN2no - how a modern corn planter works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxMcl7ktEP0 - inside the cab of the tractor for a planter
Also no one on the farm can repair any of this anymore.
But the problem the US has is that they just don't want to pay people a living wage or give them any guarantees. You know a farmer or machine operator in agriculture will have a full lifetime of work ahead of them. But in general, US employer culture does not want to commit to anything, they want to be able to fire a tenth of the workforce if there's a pandemic without any consequences.
err. Ranting but I hope you see my point. Automation isn't necessary to maintain production, it's a means to do the same job with less people.
The real problem is that it is a job where you are along for hours every day, in a rural area where there aren't many options at the end of the day for fun. Cities have some nice points, most people would like farming for a week and then get bored.
I also like the part where she says, "Dad can sit in the office and monitor my planting from there".
Now even the hard working farmer is working in an office!
They can do simple stuff like steering in a straight line at a constant speed or offset from a previously driven path. They still require a driver in the seat and more complicated operations like for example: unloading into a grain cart from a combine still has to be done by the driver.
There is work being done in this area though.
Systems to have the combine take control of the tractor while unloading into the grain cart have been commercially available for a number of years now.
I love it how people say farmers don't use technology!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM5ZBNzvKz4
The video doesn't show too much of it but Mike's equipment a bunch of technology on it as well. Some of the stuff:
- auto section control: turns off/on seed & fertilizer automatically to minimize overlaps and prevent skips. On large machines (e.g. 80 ft) the cost of overlap is quite significant. The seed and fertilizer is carried by a pneumatic system and optimally tuning the system is a bit tricky (he shows a bit of that)
- auto rate control/variable rate control: with variable rate, the field is split into many zones and the applied rate of seed and fertilizer is optimized. That's a whole topic into itself, I won't explain here.
- population/blockage monitoring: this system monitors seed and fertilizer flow in the pneumatic delivery system and will alert the operator is something is wrong (blocked run, rate to high or low). That's the "Agtron" system he is talking about.
- I don't know if his para-link drill has it but there is a variable packing system available. That will monitor packer (the wheel behind the seed opener) and adjust packing pressure depending on field conditions. Wet areas of the field will need less down pressure compared to dry areas
- As is typical these days, GPS mapping, guidance. He has two different screens showing the map. The Deere screen doesn't show the individual on/off sections of the drill and so it shows more overlap. The Topcon screen (comes with drill) shows the sections.
- The system for controlling the metering on the drill is fairly advanced. For planters, it is typically more advanced yet (corn seed is really expensive and so very precisely metering it and placing it is key). On the Bourgault drill he is using, there is a variable speed hydraulic motor on the metering system with a feedback control loop to control the rate. Early in the video he is calibrating those meters so the system knows the mass-flow feedrate of the meter (e.g. RPM of meter -> lbs/min of material). That feedrate will be converted to a per-unit-area application rate. The variable rate prescription map will provide input to the rate controller.
Just some info in case people are interested. Running a profitable farm is a challenge and most farmers are aggressive in adopting any new technology that will help them get an edge.
Yep, Nebraska. I grew up near(ish) the town on her sweatshirt.
You know he's from Saskatchewan because he pronounces Bourgault correctly! Are you from around here? I'm in Regina with a family farm about an hour north of here.
As a farmer in Ontario (Canada), I don't see anything out of the ordinary here...
This would be fairly simple to implement using a commodity serial bus if everyone could get together and agree on something, but I don't know if agricultural implements have enough of a vendor lock-in paradigm that e.g. the tractor manufacturer would be discouraged from building features to support third-party implements.
I mean I agree, but it'd require a lot of backwards compatibility and a push to get rid of existing standards, which can take decades. I mean we don't even have a unified cable standard around computers / laptops yet. Ideally I'd be able to buy a new PC with only USB-C ports in it, but we're nowhere near that.
The above is not about third parties. If we conclude we can trust you we will even give you a key to our cryptography. However trust will not be easy to establish.
[1] Automatic steering of farm vehicles using GPS. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.2134/1996.precisi...
[2] First results in vision-based crop line tracking https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/503895
A five day old account has a video rocketing past 100k views already?
So you could say that the market was already primed to receive the product :)
I think it is quite explainable.
Surely in todays world, it's very cheap to simply have a bunch of cameras looking down at the plants, and track from each seed, to each plant, to each leaf on the plants, to how many cents that plant earned you.
When you have that kind of tracking, you can do things like "If a plant is within 30mm of a neighbour, we will earn more if we kill one plant and let the other grow. Kill whichever is currently smaller".
Or "if a plant is growing within 2 inches of a rock, give it these extra nutrients".
Treating each plant separately should give much higher yields.
Our current system is equivalent to a human medical system which doesn't inspect each patient individually, but instead just prescribes medications to entire towns!
Cameras cost: $1 each ($20). Wiring: $2 each ($40). Computer cost: $120 (inc 24v PSU). GPU cost: $60.
That sort of equipment isn't going to be worth stealing.
Of course, adoption isn't universal [1] - a large farm will see a much faster payback time for the same bit of equipment, for example. And many farms will have other priorities for their limited capital; tractor auto-steer is much more popular than precision weed control.
When I was an agronomist I tried with several seed companies to get that kind of information but they didn't want to provide it. I am not certain if that has improved or not.
Most farmers are using 'precision agriculture' and fertilizing by either 2.5 acre grid squares or grids within individual soil types.
There has been a similar thing for decades, from planes. But drones mean much more regular intervals and much higher resolutions.
Have you checked corn prices lately?
It wasn't mentioned in the video, but you can get kinda close to what you're thinking today. When harvesting the crops it's possible create a map of the yield throughout the field. Then with combinations of random sampling of the soil throughout different parts of the field, one can adjust the fertilizer distribution thought the field. Finally, when you go to plant the crops next year, you can utilize this data to configure the planter to automatically space the plants a little closer or farther apart. Many farmers are already doing exactly this.
University and seed researchers sometimes do the plant by plant analysis you are taking about. They are looking at just a few hundred samples though and only getting slightly better data.
Also a lot of the screens can be attached to different machines, and or carried mobile which is useful.
They have integrated some things over the past few years (ISOBUS is the standard communication protocol for integrating). There is a lot more integration that could be done but it requires a lot of cooperation between companies. Also, the tractor is a multi-purpose tool and in this case is being used for a very specific job. So, many of the screens apply only for the job she is doing.
In my previous job, the same thing happened. In fact, one of our selling points was that we had a unified look and feel for all our equipment UI's. It made it easier for salespeople to demonstrate how buying our stuff could reduce training cost and error rates.
It's all specialized tools for specialized jobs. Not a farmer, but my understanding is tractor supplies torque for whatever tools are being pulled behind it or attached onto it.
It would be nice if these things all piped their data into a single consistent interface.
https://www.precisionfarmingdealer.com/articles/299-isobus-s...
So likely growing for animal food.
Or possibly the field is corn, for either animal food or ethanol.
Growing human food can be somewhat less complicated (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=a_7TRko1VwQ), but can also be backbreaking (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O1aHpSu7F4o)
-Mike Bloomberg
Those numbers are only semi realistic. Your local hardware store probably only has sweet corn seed (what I priced) which will not yield as much as field corn, but it is worth more if you sell as sweet corn not field corn as most farmers are selling corn. I have no idea how to account for this important factor.
Mike Bloomberg hasn't heard of fertilizer, so I didn't bother pricing that, but to get the yield I quoted every year you need to replace what the corn takes out of the soil and that means fertilizer of some sort.
Another difference is that planters typically have wider row spacings. For corn, that's not a problem because the plants want more space. However, for cereal crops like wheat, ideally the spacing should be smaller. Typically spacing for wheat might be 8 to 10 inches but even narrower might give optimal yield. To get narrow spacing, you need more seed rows and those get expensive given the complexity of the planter system (high cost per seed row).
In area she is farming, corn and soybeans are the major crops. There are a bunch of other field crops they might grow. Wheat is one but there are many others.
Example planter manufacturer (lots of other companies make them):