
Inside of a Tractor Cab [video] - jedberg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dQItxc5zto
======
throwaway894345
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
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
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 :)

~~~
fermienrico
You're a gem in the embedded world of almost pure coal and dirt mixture.

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.

~~~
superhuzza
Off the top of my head, systems where a touchscreen is probably better than
other input:

\- 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!

~~~
fermienrico
I totally disagree - for simple actions there is no need for a touchscreen.
Just put a button and a label. And LED to confirm the action, buzzer if sound
is needed. That is all you need.

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).

~~~
superhuzza
> for simple actions there is no need for a touchscreen.

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=...](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B96DRJQIIAE_y1n?format=jpg&name=small)

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...](https://cromwell-intl.com/travel/uk/london-
underground/pictures/tube-2014-04-090911.jpg)

Genuine question - Why do you think so many systems like these touchscreens?

------
dsalzman
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
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.

~~~
vvanders
Yeah, complacency and heavy machinery are a really bad combination.

Even a smaller CUT can do an incredible amount of damage in a short period of
time.

~~~
Cthulhu_
How did they solve this for the aviation industry? IIRC they've had autopilot
for decades as well. The aviation industry seems (appearances anyway) a lot
more diligent and disciplined for things like that, I mean for one they have
at least two pilots to monitor things.

~~~
red_admiral
Considering what happened to AF447, "solved" is perhaps not 100% accurate.

------
hirundo
Classified Ad Real Soon Now: Farmers wanted, remote ok.

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.

~~~
Cthulhu_
I think a lot of people wouldn't mind a remote operator job, but it would have
to be safe - in the case of tractor driving, you need to look out for other
people and nature itself. Over here in the Netherlands anyway, in the US it
seems like fields are a lot bigger and more mechanized.

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.

~~~
bluGill
US large scale is not large in general. Ukraine (or maybe Kazakhstan) are much
bigger (the old collective farms from the soviet union, the collective broke
up but not the farm). Brazil and Australia both tend to much larger farms than
the US as well (but not on the scale of Ukraine). It will be interesting to
see what happens in Africa - there are signs that continent is modernizing.

Of course if you are in western Europe US farms are big, but there is more to
the world than Europe and the US.

------
dchuk
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.

~~~
fit2rule
I've worked on software projects for safety environments - SIL-4 - as well as
telematics, and I share your pain.

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.

------
TYPE_FASTER
Logitech has controllers: [https://www.logitechg.com/en-
us/products/farm.html](https://www.logitechg.com/en-us/products/farm.html)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vx3A-zDRTFQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vx3A-zDRTFQ)

~~~
jfim
That controller looks like it would be a lot of fun with Kerbal Space Program.

~~~
umdtho
You said this and I got so excited. Controller is on the way lol.

~~~
jfim
Nice! Tell us how it works for you when you get it! :)

------
searine
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjVZoniN2no)
\- how a modern corn planter works
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxMcl7ktEP0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxMcl7ktEP0)
\- inside the cab of the tractor for a planter

~~~
exabrial
He is flying across that field

------
rexreed
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?

~~~
Cthulhu_
It wouldn't be more difficult to be honest; you can do the exact same work
with low-tech tractors and mechanical implements, you'd just need to hire more
workers. And honestly, the US is not lacking in workers at the minute.

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.

~~~
bluGill
Pay isn't the issue, rural areas have low cost of living in general and the
pay is actually pretty good. Not SF tech wages good, but still good
considering not much education is required for the labor jobs. (the farmers
make a ton of money but that requires good management because the one great
year makes up for many years of losses)

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.

------
jedberg
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!

~~~
holler
very cool! my first thought was that it looks way more complicated than a
simple joystick/steering control.

~~~
whalesalad
They drive themselves. Tractors have been using autonomous guidance systems
for a long time.

~~~
jedberg
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.

~~~
bluGill
Not everything has its own screen. The isobus standard has allowed one screen
for years. It is easier to create your own screen than to use it. Also there
is a lot to watch and so you sometimes want your own screen anyway just to
ensure the important stuff is always in eyesight.

------
rmason
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!

~~~
zwkrt
who says that?

~~~
rmason
I've read a lot of press where farmers are given as a prime example of people
not using or comfortable with tech. The journalists writing it have no idea of
what they're talking about. Yet it has become almost a meme.

------
nas
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](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.

~~~
tonyarkles
> Here is another video from Southern Saskatchewan

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.

~~~
nas
Yeah, I grew up not far from St. Brieux and the Bourgault plant. My father was
one of the first farmers in the area to start using a "new fangled" air seeder
system. That was back in the early 1980s. The machines have gotten a lot
larger, more complicated and way more expensive since then.

------
jcrawfordor
Seems like a big opportunity for improved operator ergonomics would be some
kind of open standard bus used for simple commanding - could be either
electrical or software. This way, a set of "soft buttons" could be provided on
the wheel or front panel which can be mapped to actions on accessory
equipment, so that e.g. starting and stopping the seeder (and perhaps seeing
its OK/NG status) could be done without having to reach around to its own
controller.

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.

~~~
bluGill
There is a problem safety. I work for John deere. We have some products that
are not being developed because if they were some remote hacker could open the
vavles on the anmoina tanks as the farmer is driving by a school and kill all
60 children out at recess. There are real dangers here, and things are going
to get more locked down in the protocol over time to ensure that those
scenarios don't happen.

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.

------
rocauc
The first self-driving tractors were used in research environments in 1996(!)

[1] Automatic steering of farm vehicles using GPS.
[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.2134/1996.precisi...](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.2134/1996.precisionagproc3.c91)

[2] First results in vision-based crop line tracking
[https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/503895](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/503895)

------
JamesCoyne
Am I reading this correctly?

A five day old account has a video rocketing past 100k views already?

~~~
callesgg
She is a cute girl talking about novel shit (as seen from the majority YouTube
audience )

I think it is quite explainable.

~~~
bob33212
More importantly she is doing real work. She isn't promoting a brand or
developing a line of clothes. If COVID has done anything good it has reminded
us what matters. Who cares if you have 10 million followers, if all you "do"
is promote brands. At least this lady is making food while getting followers
because of her looks.

------
londons_explore
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
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
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.

~~~
Cthulhu_
And what would be the benefit? Financially I mean. What's the return on
investment? And how does it apply to the thousands of square miles of
farmland?

~~~
michaelt
There are precision farming systems that (according to their marketing
materials) will allow you to precisely spray fertiliser only at plants, and
weedkiller only at weeds. This saves money on chemicals, and helps the
environment through reduced run-off.

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.

[1]
[https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/147418633.pdf](https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/147418633.pdf)

------
jonwinstanley
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
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.

~~~
j88439h84
> How many different screens does the average startup engineer use?
> github/lab, CI, CRM, analytics, metrics reports, ad portal, etc.

It would be nice if these things all piped their data into a single consistent
interface.

~~~
Cthulhu_
IIRC there are / have been attempts to create unified interfaces, since a lot
of the services offer APIs as well, but in practice those unified interfaces
will never offer all the functionality and information available - you just
can't keep up or manage all of it.

------
blendo
Soybeans, I think (from the same channel):
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PpJ2Xe_cyeU](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PpJ2Xe_cyeU)

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](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=a_7TRko1VwQ)),
but can also be backbreaking
([https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O1aHpSu7F4o](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O1aHpSu7F4o))

------
paypalcust83
Also, Millennial Farmer has similar videos.

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCp0rRUsMDlJ1meYAQ6_37Dw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCp0rRUsMDlJ1meYAQ6_37Dw)

------
glaberficken
My 9yo daughter just came up behind me and asked: "What are you watching? Is
that lady 'driving' an airplane?"

~~~
jedberg
My five year old walked up and said "hello!" and waved because she assumed I
was in a Zoom meeting with the woman in the video.

~~~
glaberficken
Haha! brilliant =)

------
WangComputers
"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

~~~
bluGill
At the end of the year you get a gross profit of $0.016. From there you have
to buy your seed ($0.04 each at your local hardware store), shovel, watering
can...

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.

------
Jemm
Welker farms has some good videos about the tech of farming.

------
pragmatic
Very different from the last time I operated a planter. I wonder how much the
tech cost in the tractor cab, let alone the tractor and planter.

------
pj_mukh
Question from not-a-farmer. Is this all corn and/or wheat? What does such tech
look like for non-corn/non-wheat related crops?

~~~
tonyarkles
She has another video with soybeans and it's a pretty similar process. She
said they adjusted a couple of things but were using the same tractor and
seeder.

~~~
abledon
link for her soybean planting video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpJ2Xe_cyeU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpJ2Xe_cyeU)

------
arijun
It seems the job of driving a tractor involves everything but the one thing I
would have guessed, actually driving it!

