I was looking at some CANbus data for my master's this afternoon, and I thought I would share this with you...

I helped out with some traction demonstrations at a local farm show last September.  We wanted to show how tractor ballast and tire pressure can affect traction.  I decided to go a little more high tech that just timing how long it took to do a subsoiler run.  I bought a CANCapture CANbus data logger and software, to extract tractor data on the go.  We had a laptop in the tractor, and it was connected via a wireless network to another laptop where the stands were.  Laptop #2 was connected to a widescreen TV so the crowd could see real time variation of draft force, fuel consumption and ground speed, as the tractor was moving in front of them.  Cool stuff to work with.  It's unbelievable how much information can be extracted from the sensors already in place on the tractor.  Relationships between pretty much any operating parameters can be analyzed to improve operating efficiency, or to gather field data.

Hopefully I'll do a bit more work with this next spring, got some cool ideas I want to test :)

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