Near Intersection of I-35 & I-90 Southern Mn. | As usual I agree with Lance. Got to love those quotes.
As one who uses some of this equipment, I have felt that Ag Leader is a bit better in this regard than some of the other companies although not perfect. I attribute this to the fact that possibly the guys and gals who do the development at Ag Leader may have actual farm backgrounds. Granted they are young and haven't had years behind the wheel like many of us but some experience would help.
I have fought with Trimble's thought process for their structure for some time and have always preferred Ag Leader's approach. One day it dawned on me that the Trimble stuff is not necessarily developed by farm guys and gals from the Midwest and is developed on a world wide basis where the thought processes are not necessarily the same.
Ag Leader has responded to some requests for changes but they seem painfully slow in coming sometimes. I suppose that sometimes these requests only pertain to a small group.
A case in point. When setting up a configuration on an Ag Leader Insight, Integra or Edge, it is necessary to define the vehicle (tractor, sprayer etc.) as part of the configuration process. It is very easy to neglect to indicate the GPS offsets when defining the vehicle. In some cases this is unimportant but for any type of autoswath these offsets are very important. After being this way for several years, the latest version of firmware for Integra now reviews the GPS offsets for the vehicle as part of the configuration process. This reminds the person creating the configuration of the current GPS offsets so they could be changed.
This is something we have asked for many times and has been improved but only in the Integra.
Another suggestion from one of my CoWorkers seems very good and should be easy to implement. This one concerns Manual Speed. It is often desirable to use Manual Speed for testing purposes. Once testing is done, the Manual Speed should be disabled. Here again this is easy to forget to do. When the operation is started for real, the system will behave at the Manual speed selected and not at the actual speed. If these two are resonably close than application may be acceptable but not what was desired.
With an Integra, the speed is always shown so the operator may notice that it doesn't change when still set to Manual Speed. With an Insight, speed may not be shown so there is no visual clue to the fact that Manual Speed is still in effect.
My CoWorkers suggestion is to have the portion of the screen that shows error messages such as "Rate not Responding" etc. have a message pop up occasionally reminding the operator that Manual Speed is being used. If Manual speed is actually desired, the operator would disregard the message but otherwise be reminded to disable the Manual Speed.
I know this can happen all too well as this is what happened with the first two tanks of NH3 that one of partners applied this year. The Manual speed was set to 5 MPH so the system behaved as if this was the actual speed. The actual speed was generally somewhat faster so the first tanks got on a little on the light side.
Edited by tedbear 6/19/2011 09:29
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Could somebody PLEEEEEEASE
