Skip to content

Agriculture

What’s Wrong with Multiple Display Computers in Driver Cabins?

Three cabins with 2-4 display computers each.
Figure 1. Top left: Claas cabin with three terminals. Top right: Agco cabin with two terminals. Bottom: Continental concept cabin with four terminals.

The top row shows the status quo. Two or three display computers (a.k.a. terminals) are normal. Even four display computers are not unusual. The bottom row shows the cabin of the future with four display computers. The display computers at the left and right beam show the videos from the wing mirror cameras. The display computer in the middle is the instrument cluster. The small display computer on the right-hand side shows additional information. It would be bigger in a harvester.

Let us assume for simplicity that the cabin is equipped with two display computers, which have identical hardware and nearly identical software – except for the main application. When sourced from low-volume, high-customisation electronics manufacturing services (LVHC-EMS), the two display computers, the telematics unit and a switch will cost roughly 2750 Euros for 200 machines.

We will bring down the costs to 2350 Euros, if we replace the two display computers by one computer with two displays. The computer doesn’t have a display and the displays don’t have a computer inside. The telematics unit is folded into an M.2 or PCIe card, which is plugged into a slot of the computer.

We will reduce the costs by another 200 Euros to 2150 Euros, if we source the components from a value-added reseller (VAR) instead of an LVHC-EMS. VARs buy standard components from high-volume low-customisation EMSs (HVLC-EMS). They charge lower prices because of the higher volumes, but they allow only minimal customisations.

For 200 machines, the solution with one computer and two displays saves us 80,000 Euros and 120,000 Euros per year, respectively, when sourced from an LVHC-EMS and from a VAR. We save even more, if we replace more display computers by one computer with displays and if the display computers are more expensive like ISOBUS terminals. We do not only save costs on hardware but also on software, because we consolidate multiple diverse systems into one system.

A clever change of the system architecture leads to sizeable cost savings. It also leads to a system that can easily be extended in many directions – a competitive advantage.

Read More »What’s Wrong with Multiple Display Computers in Driver Cabins?

Connectivity Solutions Will Not Help with Autonomous Farming

Over the last two years, agricultural OEMs have been in a rush to get data from their machines to their cloud servers. Claas uses Proemion’s connectivity solution. Agco, Grimme, Krone and a few others bet on AgriRouter running on SAP’s cloud servers. Holmer seems to favour Bosch’s IoT suite. All these solutions have one thing in common: They transfer little data, typically less than 50 data points per second. They top out at 100 data points. They are good for task or order management, asset tracking, fleet management, monitoring of machine health and remote diagnosis.

At least some of these companies seem to think that these connectivity solutions will help them with driver-less or autonomous farming like harvesting, seeding, spraying or fertilising. The wishful thinking would go like this.

The farm machines transfer data to the cloud. The data is used to train machine learning algorithms on extremely powerful compute servers. The model, the result of the learning process, automagically detects whether grains are dirty, maize leaves are dry or the heads of sugar beets are chopped off. Typically, this model runs in the cloud as well, because it requires more compute power than is available on the farm machine or because it adapts to new conditions and self-optimises by continuous learning. This is the way how voice assistants like Alexa and Siri understand spoken language or how medical software recognises cancer cells in MRT scans.

This approach does not work for farm machines. Here is why and what we can do about it.
Read More »Connectivity Solutions Will Not Help with Autonomous Farming

Agritechnica 2017: What’s New for Terminals?

Agritechnica 2017 was my third visit after 2013 and 2015. My focus was on terminals (display computers) as usual.

The standard terminal of 2017 is powered by a quad-core NXP i.MX6 processor (32-bit ARM Cortex-A9 with ARMv7a architecture) and has an HD 12-inch multi-touch display (resolution: 1280×800, format: 16:10). The new ISOBUS terminal CCI 1200 manufactured by CrossControl is the prime example.

In 2013, there were only terminals with single-core Cortex-A8 processors (NXP i.MX53). In 2015, there was only the odd prototype terminal with a quad-core i.MX6 in 2015 (from Grammer Belgium) but no production-quality ones. In 2017, most terminals sport a quad-core i.MX6 (Cortex-A9) processor. The processing power of terminals increases very, very slowly.

Compare this to a typical processor used in today’s in-vehicle infotainment systems. For example, the Renesas R-Car M3 sports two Cortex-A57 and four Cortex-A53 cores (all 64-bit), which has the performance of low-end to mid-range desktop PCs. Agricultural terminals need this procesing power as well, if the agricultural industry is serious about autonomous seeding, spraying and harvesting.

CLAAS demonstrated a first step into this direction. A camera is trained on the crop flow. An image recognition software (most likely using machine learning) detects whether the grains are too dirty and whether there are foreign particles between the grains. The future will see more and more such software to deduce actions from sensor data.

These expensive computations must be performed onboard the machine, because the Internet connection is not good enough on the field to send the data to powerful servers and to perform the computations there. The most powerful computer on the machine is typically the terminal. Current terminals are not powerful enough for these computations.

One terminal stands out from the uniform, slightly boring bulk of 12-inch, 1280×800 and quad-core i.MX6 terminals: the PowerView 1200 from Murphy by Enovation Controls. It is powered by a dual-core Cortex-A15 and has a 12.3-inch multi-touch display with a resolution of 1280×480 (format: 8:3). The PowerView 1200 is well-suited for dashboards and can double up as a rearview mirror.

I’ll take a more detailed look at some terminals in the rest of this post. I will ignore quite a few terminals, because they don’t stand out in any way from the rest or I simply overlooked them.
Read More »Agritechnica 2017: What’s New for Terminals?