Near Intersection of I-35 & I-90 Southern Mn. | I have an 8120 that uses a Trimble 332 running with Omnistar XP which is connected to a Trmble Autopilot. My Insight is used as the Display interface for the Autopilot.
In these systems, GPS from the 332 goes to the Nav II controller which in turn passes the GPS information to the Insight. The Insight and the Nav II communicate back and forth between each other.
In other words, the GPS that the Insight gets is not direct from the 332 but passes through the Nav II.
This system has worked well for me the past two years. This Spring a couple of firmware updates came out.
I want to warn others of some possible conflicts that I ran into. I upgraded my Insight from V 4.5 to V 5.0. I also updated my Autopilot from V 4.42 to V 4.51. I didn't upgrade my 332 from V 3.26 to V 3.27.
The upgrade process on the Insight was to put the update files on a CF card and have the Insight upgrade itself as well as the other modules in that system.
The upgrade process for the Autopilot is to use a laptop running Flashloader 200.
After performing the two upgrades, I waited for some warmer weather and finally took the tractor out. The first thing I noticed was that my 332 was attempting to use VBS rather than XP. I changed the settings with the keypad on the 332 to XP. I parked the tractor in an open spot in my dooryard and walked away to let XP converge.
Later when I returned XP had converged so I drove the tractor. I noticed that I was not getting a speed indication on the Insight. Also my position arrow on the onscreen map was not reacting. I tried using the Autopilot on a gravel road. I was able to set and see my A point and then my B point. When I tried to engage the Autopilot I got a message about degraded GPS.
The other various screens about my Omnistar subscription were not correct either.
Not exactly knowing what the problem was I tried my Insight in another tractor where everything worked properly.
I then tried hooking my 332 directly to the Insight with the data cable. This would leave the Autopilot out of the loop for troubleshooting. I felt confident that this would work.
Actually I got no valid GPS information to the Insight with that hookup. The TSIP values were shown on the view messages screen but the Insight would not show Position, Heading or speed.
In desperation, I tried the old trick of Clearing BB Ram on the 332. Once the 332 restarted it had to rebuild itself from scratch which took a while. Once this was completed, I then had good indications on the Insight. I had made some headway!
I had heard some rumblings about some incompatibility issues and called Ag Leader. Surprisingly I got through. The rumblings are apparently correct. Trimble made some changes in V 4.51 for the Nav II which caused some communication problems with my Insight running with V 5.0
I understand Ag Leader is working on an update for 5.0 which will clean up this problem. My choices were to either wait for that update from Ag Leader or downgrade my Nav II back to an earlier version. I chose to reinstall V 4.42 in my Nav II.
My system once again operates properly. The other quirk I found was that apparently when I installed V 5.0 in the Insight that the autoconfigure setting on the Autopilot tab apparently got changed. The setting was to configure the 332 as VBS. This meant that whenever I would start up the Insight it would change the 332 to VBS. I could override that my using the 332's buttons to change back to XP. The rub with that approach is that I would need to do this every time I started up the Insight. A better solution was to set the menu item to XP.
The bottom line amounted to this: Updating the Insight was OK, Updating the Autopilot was a mistake. After updating the Insight I should have checked the Autopilot configure screen to be certain that Auto Configure is turned ON and is set to the type of correction desired.
My other tractor uses an EZ-Guide 500 with another Autopilot. Upgrading the 500 to V 3.0 and that Autopilot to V 4.51 works together without the communication problem I mention above.
Edited by tedbear 3/31/2008 11:45
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Insight/Autopilot Update confusion
