Another year has come and gone and many eventful happenings took place in the history of DISTek. We may look back at 2015 as a turning point due to the substantial changes we made in all aspects of our business. Those end-of-the-year cards you get in the mail always seem to be bragging a little too much, but that is just what I am going to do because I think the year DISTek had is worth bragging about.
The ISOBUS Fall 2015 Plugfest wrapped up a couple weeks ago in Wörth am Main, Germany. If you do not know what ISOBUS or its Plugfest are, you can look at my previous blogs for a tutorial.
In this final installment of the ISOBUS Task Controller (TC) series, I will cover a few other features of TC that are relatively new.
In Part 3 of my Task Controller series, I promised to get this Part 4 out close to the time of Spring Plugfest … and I missed by over a month. Regardless, here is Part 4.
In this Task Controller (TC) series, I have detailed data collection and variable-rate application. The final big feature of TC is Section Control. This feature also has an ISOBUS Functionality called TC-SC. Most people have an idea what section control is, but for the uninitiated … section control will turn on/off various controllable sections of an implement to avoid overlap in a field.
Last week in Lincoln, NE, engineers from around the world converged for another ISOBUS Plugfest to test their ISOBUS devices with other manufacturers’ ISOBUS devices. If you do not know what ISOBUS is, then you probably have not read any of my previous blog posts! At the crux of ISOBUS is the ability to connect many different types of electronic components together from different manufacturers and have them all work together. So Plugfest provides the opportunity to test that all the different equipment works well together.
I discussed in Part 2 of the Task Controller (TC) series a type of TC that uses geo-referencing for data-logging. This form of TC has an AEF Functionality called TC-GEO, but there is another type of TC-GEO that is very enticing to farmers. Using prescription mapping and TC-GEO, a farmer can do variable-rate application to control the amount of fertilizer, herbicide, or other inputs by position in the field. Some of the obvious benefits of this approach include reduced input costs, but there are also environmental benefits.
In the last Task Controller (TC) post, I gave a broad outline of how a TC session works in the general case. In this post, I will start describing some of the different types of TCs and Tasks. These can range from very simple to very complex.
The simplest form a TC can take actually has an associated AEF Functionality associated with it: TC-BAS, which stands for Task Controller – Basic. With this type of TC, only totals are logged for a particular task.
A few months ago in this blog I gave a very broad overview of Task Controller (TC). The Virtual Terminal is probably the best-known ISOBUS feature given its visual prominence, but TC is a popular topic to discuss in the ISOBUS world because it offers many intriguing possibilities … and seeks to fulfill many of the promises of precision agriculture across manufacturers. I thought it would be useful to spell out some of the details of TC as it can be a quite confusing subject. In this post, I will walk through the components and the steps of a typical TC session.
Somehow I happened to fall into the last slot of the year for the DISTek blog. I am not complaining as it gave me a few more days to prepare. …
The Fall ISOBUS Plugfest has wrapped up here in Senlis, France. This Plugfest set a new record for attendees and participants. The final tally was over 250 attendees, 40 different test stations, 137 participants, 82 implements, and over 2300 test slots. It was quite a busy event, so kudos to the organizing committee for working through all those logistics. The slots were shortened to 20 minutes each which is probably a bit too short, but there is ongoing conversation to increase that again … possibly using some “creative” means. And with so many people attending, the building facilities are also an important consideration which seems to have worked out quite well.
For one specific set of students, a brand new school supply will be getting added to the mix. Students in the Ag Engineering program at Iowa State will be getting the opportunity to experiment with ISOBUS using DISTek’s recently released VIRTEC software libraries. There will be a couple different usage scenarios for VIRTEC at ISU. The first scenario will be for graduate research projects. The graduate students and the school work with a wide range of Ag equipment manufacturers developing cutting edge technologies, and connecting these technologies to ISOBUS is very beneficial. The second scenario will be for classroom lab exercises. These students will get a chance to do some real hands-on ISOBUS application development in a lab setting rather than simply learning about it in lectures and readings.
On August 25, 2014, Precision Ag put on a Big Data conference at Iowa State University in Ames. While the conference appeared to originally target producers more than the industry providing to the producers, the audience ended up being about 50/50 between those two groups. Attendance for the conference was approximately 300 people from all over the country.
