[HN Gopher] Inside of a Tractor Cab [video]
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Inside of a Tractor Cab [video]
Author : jedberg
Score : 127 points
Date : 2020-04-28 19:17 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| londons_explore wrote:
| It still surprises me that modern agriculture doesn't seem to
| track each individual plant.
|
| 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!
| ssully wrote:
| I am pretty sure modern agriculture does a lot of this based on
| keeping track of everything (what's planted, how much
| fertilizer, weather, soil conditions, etc). I am not sure the
| last time you have been on a farm, but setting up a system of
| static cameras to constantly monitor every individual plant
| would be very expensive and I am doubtful that it would be any
| better then what is being done now.
| londons_explore wrote:
| By "camera rig", I'm talking twenty cameras spaced at 3 foot
| intervals. Each camera a basic VGA camera at 30 fps, and all
| hooked up to a cheap computer with a low range GPU to find
| plants.
|
| 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.
| troutwine wrote:
| Absolutely. I really, really wonder how you'd manage to get
| equipment in under the camera rig. All those cameras are
| going to look pretty tempting for the folks that normally
| just steal diesel, not to mention pretty silly flying around
| in bad weather.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| This comment reminds me of a Mexican friend talking about
| farming in the town he grew up in. It's not that the farmland
| is necessarily poor, but it's uneven. To farm productively
| means knowing where and when to plant what. Problem is it
| doesn't mesh well with mechanization. At least currently.
| rmason wrote:
| It's more complicated than that. The optimum population to
| plant say corn varies by soil type. But some seeds don't
| respond well to high population. When planted tightly together
| the corn in the fall will have have thin stalks and lodge, ie
| fall down. Sure you can harvest it but anyone who has ever
| watched someone try soon realizes they have a lot of losses.
|
| 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.
| jedberg wrote:
| It's fascinating how many different screens there are for all the
| different add ons.
|
| 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!
| masklinn wrote:
| It looks like older videos were removed from the channel but
| when this first made the rounds (on twitter) a few days back
| there was a video of filling some reservoirs, and on the video
| there was a man on crutches. I assumed that'd be the father and
| why he's not operating machinery.
| holler wrote:
| very cool! my first thought was that it looks way more
| complicated than a simple joystick/steering control.
| whalesalad wrote:
| They drive themselves. Tractors have been using autonomous
| guidance systems for a long time.
| jedberg wrote:
| Yeah the autonomous driving was the least interesting part
| to me. It was everything _else_ that was running semi-
| autonomously that I found fascinating, and the fact that
| they aren 't integrated. That every piece of equipment has
| it's own screen.
| [deleted]
| DarmokJalad1701 wrote:
| > autonomous guidance systems
|
| 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.
| searine wrote:
| If you want a more indepth explanation of what is happening in
| the cab and in the seed planter, check out Dodge Brothers Farm on
| youtube. He does a really great job of going through the details.
|
| 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
| exabrial wrote:
| He is flying across that field
| nas wrote:
| I'm guessing that video is taken in the US since she is planting
| corn. Here is another video from Southern Saskatchewan. People
| might be interested in the equipment being used. Mike is quite an
| character. He works on a big operation, I think over 20k acres.
| The equipment he is using costs a fair bit of cash. The seeding
| system (para-link hoe drill) and tractor to pull it likely costs
| between 500k and 1m CAD. They have multiple units like that.
|
| 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.
| positivejam wrote:
| > I'm guessing that video is taken in the US since she is
| planting corn.
|
| Yep, Nebraska. I grew up near(ish) the town on her sweatshirt.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Hey, I worked on the touchscreen at the end of the armrest.
| Internally at John Deere it was called GSix (6th generation).
| Built with Qt, WindRiver Linux, ran on a custom board (that 1"+
| thick display is _just_ the monitor), resistive touch screen,
| speaks CAN/j1939/etc. One of the things it talked to was a buggy
| Bosch radio over a home-grown protocol that didn't actually
| expose the radio's state, so the display was forced to make
| educated guesses. This was a huge pain, especially WRT bluetooth
| pairing (at one point we had an error screen that told the user
| to just power cycle the radio because the display has already
| tried everything we could think of to get the radio back into a
| good state).
|
| 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.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I've done a few projects interfacing embedded devices, and the
| "I must guess at the device's state because the manufacturer
| didn't think communicating that was important" scenario fills
| me with sadness and rage. I'd love to slap around every
| developer who thought that making such a device was a good
| idea.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| Hopefully if you ever end up working on a device with
| firmware I've written, you'll end up pleasantly surprised.
| I've worked all over up and down the hardware/software stack
| from mobile UI down to gate-level design, and one of the
| biggest principles I've picked up over the years is that
| observability is absolutely a hard requirement. I've felt
| your pain myself and refuse to design systems that inflict
| that pain on others :)
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| That's a problem with abstraction layers and hiding state,
| observability goes into the toilet.
|
| 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.
| da_chicken wrote:
| Hey, it's Goodhart's Law! "When a measure becomes a good
| target, it ceases to be a good measure."
|
| https://www.sketchplanations.com/image/167369765942
| rrss wrote:
| See also Chapter 29 of Hamming's "The Art of Doing Science
| and Engineering": http://worrydream.com/refs/Hamming-
| TheArtOfDoingScienceAndEn...
|
| You get what you measure.
| whylie wrote:
| Thanks for your personal story - I love reading stuff like
| this.
| rmason wrote:
| To give you some perspective when I left the fertilizer business
| here in Central Michigan in 1999 the only monitor in most tractor
| cabs was the seed monitor. In combines maybe 2-3% of farmers had
| a yield monitor, probably 2-3X that in places like Illinois or
| Iowa.
|
| I love it how people say farmers don't use technology!
| JamesCoyne wrote:
| Am I reading this correctly?
|
| A five day old account has a video rocketing past 100k views
| already?
| RandallBrown wrote:
| This video made it to the front page of Reddit yesterday.
| piercebot wrote:
| Laura (https://twitter.com/carlsonlaura64) hosted the "Ag of
| the World" twitter account (27k followers;
| https://twitter.com/AGofTheWorld) for the past week, and there
| was a lot of demand on Twitter for her to upload her videos to
| YouTube.
|
| So you could say that the market was already primed to receive
| the product :)
| maxerickson wrote:
| Many more on Twitter:
|
| https://twitter.com/AGofTheWorld/status/1252965311269273602
| callesgg wrote:
| She is a cute girl talking about novel shit (as seen from the
| majority YouTube audience )
|
| I think it is quite explainable.
| dchuk wrote:
| At first I thought this was a Tractor Cab in the sense of a
| Tractor Trailer and I got excited...
|
| 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.
| dsalzman wrote:
| People in Ag love to say that they "built the first self driving
| vehicles". The auto steers were cutting edge and have been around
| since the 80s. Those cabs are also air conditioned and usually
| have a nice comfy leather seat. Once it's all dialed in it's
| monitoring the screens and browsing HN. A lot of you could be
| farmers!! /s
| jackfoxy wrote:
| Worked my way through college in Ag during 70's and early 80's,
| before self driving anything. I can tell you from experience
| it's easy to be lulled into a sense of complacency by the
| boredom. I'm sure the human is still there because things can
| go wrong in a hurry, and when they do go wrong with a piece of
| equipment that powerful they go wrong in a big way.
| Loughla wrote:
| Anecdotal - a friend of mine still farms full time. He row
| crops in the midwest US. One of his fields butts up against the
| local small town. Last year, on the north side of the field,
| the rows are arrow straight. The south side were squirrely and
| curved all over compared to them.
|
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| And they cost more than an RV, right?
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Never bought an RV, but $250K is not uncommon. You can also
| get tractors, combines, etc that cost multiples of that.
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| Depends in the RV and the tractor. Just like every other
| piece of commercial equipment the price is partly a
| reflection of how much money the manufacturer expects you to
| make with it.
| [deleted]
| WangComputers wrote:
| "I could teach anybody, even people in this room, to be a farmer.
| It's a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt
| on top, add water, up comes the corn."
|
| -Mike Bloomberg
| [deleted]
| TYPE_FASTER wrote:
| Logitech has controllers: https://www.logitechg.com/en-
| us/products/farm.html
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vx3A-zDRTFQ
| masklinn wrote:
| Weirdly that's significantly less technologically advanced than
| the video's control. It's just a bunch of switches and buttons.
|
| Though I wonder how programmable it is, could be a pretty cool
| automation control panel.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Those controllers look like so much fun! They're not hatefully
| expensive either. It looks like they're probably USB HID, too.
| jonwinstanley wrote:
| Looks like a pretty bad user experience. I understand why you'd
| want that many screens, so all the data is visible, but they all
| look like they are built by different companies and with
| different types of screens and different styles of interface.
| Surely it must be hard to use?
| floatrock wrote:
| How many different screens does the average startup engineer
| use? github/lab, CI, CRM, analytics, metrics reports, ad
| portal, etc.
|
| 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.
| shakezula wrote:
| Yeah, one glance at that setup to me and you can tell it's
| modular on purpose. Farms like these use their tractors as
| modular platforms that they build to fit their specific
| needs.
| foofoo55 wrote:
| ISOBUS was supposed to fix this by using the same monitor for
| multiple implements.
|
| https://www.precisionfarmingdealer.com/articles/299-isobus-s...
| searine wrote:
| The idea is modularity. This is just for seed planting, but you
| can swap out screens for different tools attached to the back.
|
| Also a lot of the screens can be attached to different
| machines, and or carried mobile which is useful.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Ironically John Deere's experience was much better than many
| competitors, or at least it was for a very long time. Some
| competitors' cabs looked like the cockpit of a soviet era
| fighter jet, with everything controlled by a huge array of
| toggle switches.
| nas wrote:
| The user experience is a lot better than it was a few years ago
| but you are correct, it's a lot of screens. There are two
| screens for the tractor itself. The lower screen above
| throttle, displays and controls tractor related stuff. The
| screen above does GPS guidance and mapping (automatic
| steering). There is a screen from the planter tool. That does
| mapping as well and probably does seed (population) rate
| control. The small blue screen I think is for the fertilizer
| controller (separate system and manufacturer again). I guess
| the screen all the way to the right is also for the planting
| tool. Maybe monitors the tanks that store the seed and other
| planter properties. I'm not familiar with the planter she is
| using.
|
| 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.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| This is the same situation in any number of industries where
| you can "mix & match" equipment. Even different products from
| the same company might have radically different UIs. Like
| anything else, it's not ideal, but you get used to it.
|
| 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.
| rexreed wrote:
| Agtech is high tech now, especially for the large agribusiness.
| Without this tech I would think it would be difficult to feed as
| many people as we do. Does this mean there needs to be more tech
| hiring in agribusiness?
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