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North Central Iowa | A little follow up to share some additional installation insights. On the VCMs, the instructions are to install them left to right in serial number order. I missed that part and had everything installed before I noticed. Didn't want to move them as everything was bolted on and plugged in. This wasn't a big deal, can reorder them in the setup. What did become a problem is that I sometimes had the VCMs on the front of the boom and some on the back due to the physical configuration of the boom and how it folds. So the instructions indicate to plug the respective 6 valve cable into each VCM from left to right, so the valves to the left of the VCM plug into the left port and the valves to the right of the VCM plug into the right port. But this assumes the VCM is mounted on the rear of the boom. What they really mean is that the valves to the left of the VCM are plugged into the port labeled "1-6" and the right valves into port "7-12". This particular distinction seems obvious in retrospect, but is only explicit in the troubleshooting. The symptom was valves operating in weird order (luckily only sitting in the yard with water experimenting). Once I switched this around (took awhile it find this solution/problem in Ag Leader's documentation) it worked fine, but you at first get a bunch of errors at startup and you have to go into the VCM configuration and have it relearn VCM/valve order.
With all that, finally started spraying my corn Friday and everything went pretty smoothly. Adjusted the default looking forward time down as the valves were turning on too soon coming out of waterways. Also experimented a bit with what to set for the hold/standby pressure setting for the control valve. I'm operating at 45 psi and so I set the control valve to a "standby pressure" of 50 psi as that is pretty close to what it jumps to when the entire boom shuts off at once. "Hold" might also work, but the "Standby Pressure" setting lets the valve move to produce pressure before you even start when first moving into the field.
One criticism I'll make is the documentation for actual operation and setup. The manual gives good information on where things are found on the screen and the physical aspects of the system, but gives basically no description of what some of the functions actually do or how they operate differently for different settings. The options for the control valve are a good example. There is no description of the difference between "Hold" and "Standby Pressure" and why you might choose one or the other. More explanation in the manual or built in help screens would be immensely helpful (even the old Trimble EZ Guide 500 had decent built in help screens for various settings). The descriptions for Prime and Relief of the boom are also pretty vague and don't describe what its really doing or why you might want to use. Kind of like an owner's manual for a car, tells you all the functions but doesn't help you understand how to drive the car. | |
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