As usual, the Spring ISOBUS PlugFest was held this past May 10-12 in sunny Lincoln, Nebraska. Sadly, Benjamin Jefferson had to miss this time at the last minute, but his bad luck turned out in your humble author’s favor, as I (a newer member of the VIRTEC team) got to experience PlugFest first-hand!
Dawn Equipment Company, an implement manufacturer located near Chicago, turned to DISTek to solve an ISOBUS-related issue. (ISOBUS is the ag industry’s solution to compatibility between different manufacturers’ electronics.)
The ISOBUS Spring 2016 Plugfest is just around the corner on May 10-12. As has been the case for a while, the event will again be in Lincoln, NE.
The 2016 AMC Engineering Conference will be held April 19th – 21st at the Five Sullivan Brothers Convention Center in Waterloo, Iowa. This conference provides a forum for agricultural and off-highway engineers to come together to celebrate and grow engineering skills in the Midwest. DISTek’s involvement in this conference continues to grow every year.
For Immediate Release
Cedar Falls, IA – March 1, 2016 – DISTek Integration, Inc., an acknowledged world leader in ISOBUS technology, today announced a partnership with STW Technic, a premier manufacturer of mobile controllers and measurement technology, to provide a flexible and powerful ISOBUS-compliant electronic controller for the agriculture marketplace.
DISTek recently attended the National Farm Machinery Show in Louisville, KY and will be on display at the upcoming Commodity Classic, March 3rd -5th, in New Orleans, Louisiana.
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.
