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Living Room / Re: Automakers Want to Outlaw Gearheads From Working on Their Own Cars
« Last post by tomos on November 24, 2015, 03:06 PM »edit// not really sure if this in correct thread, but will leave it...
there's not much info here but still of interest:
Open source hardware autonomous tractor uses repurposed drone autopilot (boingboing)
video from same:
From here:
http://ifixit.org/bl...7007/farm-equipment/
And a snippet from there:Aside from using it, there’s not much you can do with modern ag equipment. When it breaks or needs maintenance, farmers are dependent on dealers and manufacturer technicians—a hard pill to swallow for farmers, who have been maintaining their own equipment since the plow."
"[DIY repair] is cheaper than calling out the technician. But that information is just not out there," Dave explained to me.
The cost and hassle of repairing modern tractors has soured a lot of farmers on computerized systems altogether. In a September issue of Farm Journal, farm auction expert Greg Peterson noted that demand for newer tractors was falling. Tellingly, the price of and demand for older tractors (without all the digital bells and whistles) has picked up. “As for the simplicity, you’ve all heard the chatter,” Machinery Pete wrote. “There’s an increasing number of farmers placing greater value on acquiring older simpler machines that don’t require a computer to fix.”
The problem is that farmers are essentially driving around a giant black box outfitted with harvesting blades. Only manufacturers have the keys to those boxes. Different connectors are needed from brand to brand, sometimes even from model to model—just to talk to the tECU. Modifications and troubleshooting require diagnostic software that farmers can’t have. Even if a farmer managed to get the right software, calibrations to the tECU sometimes require a factory password. No password, no changes—not without the permission of the manufacturer.
John Deere, in particular, has been incredibly effective at limiting access to its diagnostic software. Which is why I wouldn’t have been able to tweak the programming on Dave’s tractor, even if I had been able to hack together the right interface. John Deere doesn’t want me to. The dealer-repair game is just too lucrative for manufacturers to cede any control back to farmers.-Renegade (April 23, 2015, 09:40 AM)
there's not much info here but still of interest:
Open source hardware autonomous tractor uses repurposed drone autopilot (boingboing)
video from same:
