Near Intersection of I-35 & I-90 Southern Mn. | I agree. Last Year, I planted with my personal Insight and borrowed a second one since I needed to start spraying before the soybean planting was finished. I really needed two Insights for a day or two. I was able to borrow a backup unit from the store. I was able to take a backup of my personal unit and put it on the borrowed unit.
At that point in time the reference maps, field names, summaries, configurations etc. were identical. The borrowed unit finished planting and my personal unit was moved to the sprayer. The reason for this was that my personal unit had autoswath unlocked and the borrowed unit did not.
Before I returned the borrowed unit, I backed it up and restored my personal unit with that backup. That meant that my personal unit had all the planting data on it (both what it had actually done and also what the other had done). The spraying that was done in the mean time with my own unit was walked over but the daily log files were correct. There was a log file (.ilf) created by each Insight for what it had done in each session.
I did this since I was most interested in the complete planting data and was not so concerned about the spraying data. So I was able to merge the planting data in that respect but this is not what you have in mind.
I do not believe it is possible to truly merge the data. This would be very handy for an operation that had two or more planters and two or more combines. It would be desirable that the entire planting picture be available in each combine at harvest time (and possibly other times of the year too). Your situation would be similar.
This problem of having two or more Insights is also compounded for certain operations when they are both in the same field at the same time. For example, any operation involving autoswath such as Seed Command or Direct command relies on the fact that the Insight being used "knows" which areas of the field have been covered. If two sprayers or two planters are operating in the same field, each only knows what it has covered and not what was done by the other.
This problem is not unique to the Insight but would be true for other brands of equipment as well.
The other downside I had to my method was that when I read the data in from both Insights, I tended to get a "doubling" effect in the summaries. The maps were correct but the summaries come from the summary portion of the data. Since a field planted with my personal unit was in effect copied to the other monitor, when data from that monitor was read into SMS, it was considered different and added to the summary.
The reason for this is that SMS'ssummary is a running total so to speak of the activities done so far. The actual maps (GPS logged points) are only associated with the particular file from where they were saved. SMS creates the maps from this data. So there is only one correct Map.
If SMS sees that the field was again planted by a different Insight it simply enters that into the Summary as well. This explains the "doubling" effect.
I don't see an easy way around the problem when two Insights are working in the same field at the same time. This would require some type of communication between the two.
Remember that the reference map for planting that you see at harvest time is just a "screen shot" of the data when the planting was completed. The actual point by point data is not retained. This is different than the map you make with SMS where the data itself is processed to create the map on the PC.
This makes the task of merging the reference maps and then reloading them into the desired Insights fairly complex but yet desirable.
Edited by tedbear 7/23/2007 17:11
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Insight
