Macy - 3/25/2008 21:40
For my two cents... the problem with trying to integrate with Deere is that we never see what all they can do until our customers have been out in the field and have done it. There are about 1300 ways (ok... a little exaggeration) that they log data. Most of those ways, like Trimble, were devised because they think they are doing us a favor. But... if they would just pick the most complex way of doing it, and make simple stuff look complex, life would get much simpler for all concerned.
Case in point. You are planting one variety in a field. So, they define a single "seeding" operation in the monitor, covering the full width of the machine. But, as soon as you say you want to record two varieties, they completely change the logging file format. There is no similarity between the two. The second format is much more complex. But guess what... we have to handle the second format anyway, so why try to "help us" by "dumbing down" single variety entry. Why not just give us a two-part planter with the same variety in both sides in the single-variety scenario?
The industry, at large, is crying for each vendor to generate a set of "golden data" and a narrative and spatial summary of what we should all be able to see from that data. What we get is a vendor's bench simulations during early design processes, and then we wait for our customers to give us the real stuff.
Farmworks & GS2
