New High-Tech Farm Equipment Is a Nightmare for Farmers

[Galenbo]

I tried to find information on Canbus some years ago, nothing, a closed system. Is this still the case?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN_bus

You can log/red/write/hack it, bus as in every communication network, it can be hopeless to reverse engineer it.
Especially with dynamic components (plug them in, they get all their settings 1time automatically from another component, then they start to communicate according to that.



Problem is that in the repair field, you cannot investigate such things for a couple of days. And it's already broke, so you would need a second working system to see what it's supposed to do.

[Rick Law]

Three farmers in a bar...

Farmer 1:
I love those new computer controlled robotic pig feeders, I am saving so much money.

Farmer 2:
Yeah, but my pigs are 5V pigs, I can't afford to upgrade all my pigs to 3.3V.

Farmer 3:
Well, at least your 5V pigs are still alive.  I forgot to update my anti-virus.  My pigs got hit by a virus last Friday.  Most of them are just walking around in circles, and many of them now is totally unresponsive and making funny Onk Onk sound I've never heard before.

Farmer 1:
Have you tried hold down both ears and press the nose?

Farmer 3:
Yeah, but rebooting doesn't work.  I tried, but most of my pigs woke up, then froze, then face turn blue, and crash down again.

[aroby]

The trend with the big equipment manufacturers is to sell capability not product.  They want to sell you the capability to dig holes - a machine, a service plan, preventive maintenance etc.  Same with tractors, combines etc.  Deere and others are contemplating teaming with seed manufacturers to be sell machines that plant optimal seed patterns (more in fertile areas, less in infertile areas) and monitor how they grow.  They want the farmers' data as well.  There is a value proposition for this for large farms / mines / construction sites, but not for small ones that just want to buy a capable tool.

[Rerouter]

Can bus is more of less locked down, while any one can get the tools to decode the data off the bus, you have to jump through some hoops to get the standards that begin telling you what does what, and many, many many! more hoops if you are interested in a manufacturer or  model specific piece of data on the bus,

for that kind of stuff, being bold enough to arrive at a primary dealership / service site for that brand, wearing an orange vest and work clothes and talking to a supervisor can get results (I work with vehicle logging devices that use can-bus) and so far for 6 brands this has been the only way i have managed to get anything. 2 of the brands do not even allow printing off of there chained to the wall service computer, (camera phone...)

For even ride on mowers i have seen the same, a European brand would go into limp mode if it went a few months past its service date, that could only be reset by a dealer tool, that person had the smarts to hook up a can-bus sniffer to the diagnostic port and logged everything the dealer tool did, took him about 4 weeks of brain bending but he found how the new date was set, and from then on has been servicing them himself,


Another thing i have seen is AD-Blu systems and would imagine it is common to AG aswell, there are atleast 2 brands of buses going around that have very poorly made level sensors (internally leak), i've since repaired a number of them, but looked into what it would take to disable the system, or atleast replace the level sensor with an aftermarket fuel sensor, and in both cases there was a few hundred thousand dollors fine for an individual to tamper with the system, not disable, just tamper with.... and closer to a few million for a company to tamper with the system,

[Rupunzell]

The goal is pay per usage, license fee per time or usage. Don't conform, comply to the rules, we take that item away from you or completely stop the owner from using in as much as possible including using the force of government law. Hack away, bust the pass words get it working your way and they will use the force of government law to stop and penalize those who do this.

This marketing ideology is appearing in too many uP controlled devices today.

Consider the implications for driverless passenger cars or driverless vehicles in general.



Bernice

Can bus is more of less locked down, while any one can get the tools to decode the data off the bus, you have to jump through some hoops to get the standards that begin telling you what does what, and many, many many! more hoops if you are interested in a manufacturer or  model specific piece of data on the bus,

for that kind of stuff, being bold enough to arrive at a primary dealership / service site for that brand, wearing an orange vest and work clothes and talking to a supervisor can get results (I work with vehicle logging devices that use can-bus) and so far for 6 brands this has been the only way i have managed to get anything. 2 of the brands do not even allow printing off of there chained to the wall service computer, (camera phone...)

For even ride on mowers i have seen the same, a European brand would go into limp mode if it went a few months past its service date, that could only be reset by a dealer tool, that person had the smarts to hook up a can-bus sniffer to the diagnostic port and logged everything the dealer tool did, took him about 4 weeks of brain bending but he found how the new date was set, and from then on has been servicing them himself,


Another thing i have seen is AD-Blu systems and would imagine it is common to AG aswell, there are atleast 2 brands of buses going around that have very poorly made level sensors (internally leak), i've since repaired a number of them, but looked into what it would take to disable the system, or atleast replace the level sensor with an aftermarket fuel sensor, and in both cases there was a few hundred thousand dollors fine for an individual to tamper with the system, not disable, just tamper with.... and closer to a few million for a company to tamper with the system,

[pickle9000]

This is an article on a small Toyota tractor. An engineering fault for sure and a scary failure mode (acceleration increase). Even after this I know of many farmers that really like these tractors. 

http://philipshaw.ca/2010/03/04/toyotas-meltdown-hearing-feeling-seeing-what-about-our-farm-equipment-2/

I think that one thing that is often missed by people looking at things like farming is that there is a great deal of engineering going on all the time. In some cases by massive corporations making combines, a small business making a blueberry bush shaker, a farmers custom poo pump. There will be a market for basic farm equipment. Not everyone does grain, beef chicken and mushrooms. From the gruesome cattle processing systems to combines it all counts. 

[hans]

I have worked at a company that designed&made aftermarket GPS steering systems for agriculture.

In automation of ag. gear there is a thing called ISOBUS. This is a standardization of connectors, CAN bus cabling & timing (bitrate) and protocols to allow multiple manufacturers gear to be interchangeable (huh in theory..).

But competition is not "competition" without locking your own stuff down. E.g. Trimble has a tendency to make their own 'standards'; e.g. with CMR, CMRx, SecureRTK or other proprietary protocols for spraying applications. It's always a cat & mouse game; when they introduce a proprietary protocol it's just a matter of time before it's reverse engineered and made compatible with other vendors.

This is no exception for tractors steering, and in particular GPS ready tractors with an after market kit. 10 years ago most GPS steering systems were hydraulically operated. There were no checks from the tractor.. the user steering wheel was decoupled so it's not moving all over the place and also so the user doesn't have to fight the wheel in an manual override situation.

Modern tractors now come with their own hydraulic steering ECU's with lots of failure modes and sanity checking. It's scary when you start up a top-of-the-line JD tractor that's 3-4 years old, and the number of error codes it can develop when tinkering with it (e.g. implement or even machine steering). Or even funnier; just by age (wear - these machines get abused alot) that develops a minor glitch. For some things it's obvious why; because it's a safety concern. These machines get shaken up all over the place, so a cable fault is quite common. So a lot of redundancy is built-in; with all contradictions checked and reported. Fatal steering sensor error? Sorry - that gearbox is staying in PARK. Thank you very much.

This means that breaking into one of these systems is a lot more difficult. Try to hijack a digital steering potentiometer (usually an angle sensors with PWM output)? I hope you're not using a mechanical relay for that; any discontinuation or substantial phase jitter will make the tractors board computer go mad.

A lot of these machines are "GPS ready"; meaning they have some connection for an OEM GPS field computer. However , many customers likely wish to use their existing system.. because that's what contains all their fields, harvest & crop data, special modules and installations, but in addition may be used on other machines as well.
In that case, reverse-engineering a CAN protocol to the machine's steering controller is often necessary. This is not a particularly hard task; but often requires a lot of time to filter out the huge pile of CAN messages.

But if your brand name is called JD; you can go 1 step better. You just encrypt & lock down the CAN protocol as well, and except any after-market supplier to pay a 6-digit sum of money to them to use their own protocol. I believe there is also 1 year cooldown before you can use it, operation restrictions are in place (which ofcourse their own GPS system doesn't have), steering quality is substantially worse than JD systems (ofcourse) and a substantial fee must be paid per system sold (basically diminishing the complete margin for a 15k euro RTK kit).

But as I said; it's a cat & mouse game. One way or another we figure out a solution. Some are less beautiful then others. E.g. using an Arduino based module as a proof-of-concept to steer a 200hp+ 8 ton machine is quite wrong in many ways.

[cosmicray]

Can bus is more of less locked down, while any one can get the tools to decode the data off the bus, you have to jump through some hoops to get the standards that begin telling you what does what, and many, many many! more hoops if you are interested in a manufacturer or  model specific piece of data on the bus,

Ford is allowing access to the data for *some* Ford models. There is a project about this ...
http://openxcplatform.com/