Hey, I worked on the touchscreen at the end of the armrest. Internally at John Deere it was called GSix (6th generation). Built with Qt, WindRiver Linux, ran on a custom board (that 1"+ thick display is _just_ the monitor), resistive touch screen, speaks CAN/j1939/etc. One of the things it talked to was a buggy Bosch radio over a home-grown protocol that didn't actually expose the radio's state, so the display was forced to make educated guesses. This was a huge pain, especially WRT bluetooth pairing (at one point we had an error screen that told the user to just power cycle the radio because the display has already tried everything we could think of to get the radio back into a good state).
The contractors for whom I originally took over apparently had a contract to write unit tests, probably for a certain amount of test coverage or something. There was a bunch of dead code buried that was only executed by the tests, apparently to bump up their unit test coverage. This was one of many such horrors. We ultimately told management that it was cheaper to rewrite the thing than it was to fix their backlog of "must have" bugfixes, and it was a huge success. Still didn't fix the radio issues, however.
I've done a few projects interfacing embedded devices, and the "I must guess at the device's state because the manufacturer didn't think communicating that was important" scenario fills me with sadness and rage. I'd love to slap around every developer who thought that making such a device was a good idea.
Hopefully if you ever end up working on a device with firmware I’ve written, you’ll end up pleasantly surprised. I’ve worked all over up and down the hardware/software stack from mobile UI down to gate-level design, and one of the biggest principles I’ve picked up over the years is that observability is absolutely a hard requirement. I’ve felt your pain myself and refuse to design systems that inflict that pain on others :)
You're a gem in the embedded world of almost pure coal and dirt mixture.
I also want to stab embedded developers with a pin header if they ever try to use a touch screen. About the only place a touch screen makes sense and is provably better is your phone. Any other application of a touch screen needs to be eradicated from this planet.
Thing is, it's expected of a lot of devices with a screen to have that screen be a touch screen too.
I've worked on the touch screen UI for a 3D printer, one that used to have a tiny OLED and a rotating push button. Company did some usability research on that and people couldn't figure out how to use that combination.
The touch screen UI was well researched and won an award even and I dare say one function regressed because of the touch screen, but that function (manual build plate leveling where you look at the nozzle instead of the screen) you should never need any more because the rest of the machine got better.
Modern car manufacturers: "Hey let's replace this perfectly fine working knob with a touch screen that sorta looks and feels like a knob but really isn't and that will need an outrageously expensive replacement just after the warranty ends"...
Off the top of my head, systems where a touchscreen is probably better than other input:
- Ticket machines
- Food machines
- Informational kiosks
- Border control machines
Basically whenever you have a public-facing system that's designed to be used for a short period of time, with relatively simple input.
Touchscreens are more accessible than mouse/keyboards, because many people genuinely don't use mouse and keyboards at all. Furthermore, it's a lot easier to keep a touchscreen clean than a mouse and keyboard!
I totally disagree - for simple actions there is no need for a touchscreen. Just put a button and a label. And LED to confirm the action, buzzer if sound is needed. That is all you need.
The only advantage of a touchscreen is surprisingly not the ability to touch, but the ability to reconfigure the input interface through software. When you don't need to reconfigure things, encoders, toggles, push buttons, rotary switches, etc. are far superior (with some downsides - cost, reliability).
> for simple actions there is no need for a touchscreen.
Ok, here's a simple action, that's often solved by touchscreens - Choose a destination from a ticket machine. Let's start with the button-first approach. Here's what the London Underground ticket machines used to look like:
No, your hands are gonna get tired after about 3 mins of using surface. All these futuristic videos showing what the future entails - everyone using a touch screen or a gesture - is ergonomically aggregious and completely out of touch(no pun) with reality.
Only with some sort of approximately-tactile feedback. Some VR systems fall completely short of this (most dataglove type devices) while other "cruder" ones (like console controllers) actually do a better job because interfaces like buttons and triggers are analogous to many real world sensations.
I had to endurance test some industrial flash EEPROM in a humidity/thermal cycling chamber to simulate failure, but the darn Atmel flash was too good. Even so, I wrote logging code that anticipated bit and block pathologies with a layer of turbo coding FEC to extend the serviceable life of the flash well beyond the manufacturer's spec.
What are you concerned about and what are you preaching about in vague, motivational quotes? Have you even ever done any embedded software development in a shipping industrial product? The only industrial flash available at the time (SLC) and already spec'ed in the manufacturing BOM had a warranted cycle time of 10^5 writes. It was doing upwards of 10^6 just fine, but it would've taken months to get close to 10^7. The desired goal was to make the flash live 10-20+ years while writing log data to spare space including data points such as temperature, voltage, errors, etc. for as long as possible.
That's a problem with abstraction layers and hiding state, observability goes into the toilet.
Interesting thing I learned about designing production test equipment. If you show the operator all the nasty state information they quickly learn to associate trashy diagnostic output with corrective action. That janky message means, run it again, it'll pass. This other one means that row of pogo pins needs to be replaced.
My other pet peeve is in-band communication without escape codes. Oh, the radio connected you so now you're talking to the other end. Oh, the link got dropped so now you're talking to the radio itself. What could have been a simple search-for-sequence filter now becomes a best-guess filter. Gaaaah makes my blood boil even 5 years later.
Honestly after my experience in firmware and manufacturing I'm amazed anything every works
I graduated EE with ('understanding' but) bafflement that radio works. Like just plain old amplitude or frequency modulated radio. Madness.
I work with software now/currently. I'd be surprised it all works if only it wasn't so frequently clear that it doesn't! I suppose the idea of updates has been quite quickly ingrained in the consumer mind - software bugs are somehow more acceptable, seen as just 'to be fixed' rather than 'broken' or 'poorly made', 'not very robust'.
If you still work at John Deere all of your customers in the UK would love it if you could improve the anti-theft systems in the Greenstar units. It's becoming an epidemic, I've personally had 2 stolen, and know of many others, if you forget to take them out of the cab for one night they're gone. We believe they are being stolen to order by perhaps an organised group here.
> There was a bunch of dead code buried that was only executed
> by the tests, apparently to bump up their unit test coverage.
I've seen this trick used before; puff up the code base with just-gotta-work type filler (e.g., adding layers of abstraction and tons of parameter checking and re-checking) in order to hit some code-coverage metric. I mean, who's going to argue about a layer of abstraction, it's an automatic good thing, right? And parameter checking is what separates us from the animals!
Encountering code like this is usually a Bad Sign.
Nice. I worked on Trimble packet radios and other products that shared the firmware codebase. Autonomous steering and "TCAS for vehicles" of JD, Cat and Case equipment had working prototypes in 2000. Back then, horizontal blade angle was doable using kinematic GPS with antennas on each end of the blade.
People in Ag love to say that they “built the first self driving vehicles”. The auto steers were cutting edge and have been around since the 80s. Those cabs are also air conditioned and usually have a nice comfy leather seat. Once it’s all dialed in it’s monitoring the screens and browsing HN. A lot of you could be farmers!! /s
Anecdotal - a friend of mine still farms full time. He row crops in the midwest US. One of his fields butts up against the local small town. Last year, on the north side of the field, the rows are arrow straight. The south side were squirrely and curved all over compared to them.
When I asked what the hell happened, he said the auto-steer went out, and by the time he figured out how to even run the planter while it was planting, he was done.
He laughed and said that the biggest problem wasn't the loss in yield, it was that he dropped his psp and broke it.
My old timer story: I worked for TRW Space Electronics Group a long time ago. TRW Automotive was a distant division. They wanted a high tech gadget for tractors. So they came to my department. They needed a true ground speed sensor because the amount of tire slip has a huge impact on fuel economy when plowing fields, and manually controlling throttle to achieve optimal slip isn't reliable. We developed a gadget that used doppler radar and some digital signal processing. Output signal fed into throttle control. Seemed amazingly high tech for tractors at the time which was more than 20 years ago.
Worked my way through college in Ag during 70's and early 80's, before self driving anything. I can tell you from experience it's easy to be lulled into a sense of complacency by the boredom. I'm sure the human is still there because things can go wrong in a hurry, and when they do go wrong with a piece of equipment that powerful they go wrong in a big way.
Hah, yup, one minute everything's fine and the next minute your combine is jammed, a belt starts slipping, and then it all catches fire.
At least some of this fancy automation stuff helps catch problems like that before they get out of hand; now you just need a John Deere licensed technician to make a service call and reset the fault lockout...
How did they solve this for the aviation industry? IIRC they've had autopilot for decades as well. The aviation industry seems (appearances anyway) a lot more diligent and disciplined for things like that, I mean for one they have at least two pilots to monitor things.
Depends in the RV and the tractor. Just like every other piece of commercial equipment the price is partly a reflection of how much money the manufacturer expects you to make with it.
Classified Ad Real Soon Now: Farmers wanted, remote ok.
We are approaching the point at which people who like to play farming simulators can be charged a fee for the privilege of actually farming. Using the same app.
Even Tom Sawyer didn't dare to charge Ben Rogers to whitewash Aunt Polly's fence.
I think a lot of people wouldn't mind a remote operator job, but it would have to be safe - in the case of tractor driving, you need to look out for other people and nature itself. Over here in the Netherlands anyway, in the US it seems like fields are a lot bigger and more mechanized.
But yeah, what do you do if you have a breakdown or an issue in the machine (like a rock stuck somewhere) that needs fixing? I guess if you look at US large-scale operations (five combines next to one another) you could have one maintenance guy / foreman with five remote operators?
I do think we'll see more of that. I mean there's the jobs depicted on TV (so I don't know if this is actually a thing) of people looking at security cameras, that can be done from home I think. Plenty of FNAF fans that have done that for ages.
But it has to be secure. I mean another remote operator job I can think of is in factories and power plants, but that's really not something you want to be doable over the internet. Even without internet, stuxnet (?) proved you can cause damage in that kind of systems.
US large scale is not large in general. Ukraine (or maybe Kazakhstan) are much bigger (the old collective farms from the soviet union, the collective broke up but not the farm). Brazil and Australia both tend to much larger farms than the US as well (but not on the scale of Ukraine). It will be interesting to see what happens in Africa - there are signs that continent is modernizing.
Of course if you are in western Europe US farms are big, but there is more to the world than Europe and the US.
At first I thought this was a Tractor Cab in the sense of a Tractor Trailer and I got excited...
But, still similar enough. I run product for a Telematics Platform company that sells into the large enterprise fleets. Have spent a lot of time in cabs of trucks learning about what driver's need and trying to "feel the pains" of being a commercial driver. It's a rough and tough environment, though the new vehicles are pretty damn nice.
Building software systems for things that move and can't really afford any downtime is a great set of challenges that I never would have expected to enjoy. Much less trying to shift paradigms in a legacy-laden industry away from "boxes of software" to a true development platform.
I've worked on software projects for safety environments - SIL-4 - as well as telematics, and I share your pain.
But it's always amusing how far telematics folks will go to avoid certification for SIL-4. The whole telematics industry should just bite the bullet and catch up with, for example, the decades of experience the rail transportation guys have in making all those pieces fit.
If you want a more indepth explanation of what is happening in the cab and in the seed planter, check out Dodge Brothers Farm on youtube. He does a really great job of going through the details.
Agtech is high tech now, especially for the large agribusiness. Without this tech I would think it would be difficult to feed as many people as we do. Does this mean there needs to be more tech hiring in agribusiness?
It wouldn't be more difficult to be honest; you can do the exact same work with low-tech tractors and mechanical implements, you'd just need to hire more workers. And honestly, the US is not lacking in workers at the minute.
But the problem the US has is that they just don't want to pay people a living wage or give them any guarantees. You know a farmer or machine operator in agriculture will have a full lifetime of work ahead of them. But in general, US employer culture does not want to commit to anything, they want to be able to fire a tenth of the workforce if there's a pandemic without any consequences.
err. Ranting but I hope you see my point. Automation isn't necessary to maintain production, it's a means to do the same job with less people.
Pay isn't the issue, rural areas have low cost of living in general and the pay is actually pretty good. Not SF tech wages good, but still good considering not much education is required for the labor jobs. (the farmers make a ton of money but that requires good management because the one great year makes up for many years of losses)
The real problem is that it is a job where you are along for hours every day, in a rural area where there aren't many options at the end of the day for fun. Cities have some nice points, most people would like farming for a week and then get bored.
What I see here is a machine that replaces human work with petrol. We could definitely feed people without these machines, but there might be less meat in their plate, and more workers needed to produce the food.
It would just shift more to healthier meat like beef instead of so much chicken. Beef production requires no large tractors, seeders, harvesters, etc. You are just letting cows eat grass. Chicken production is basically an extra step in corn production, so it needs all the equipment involved in corn production.
I think that is actually a very harmful myth that huge multinational corporations want to keep in people's minds. We produce less food per acre with modern industrial farming, not more. They optimize for total cost, not for land use. We could feed more people than we feed now just fine without any modern equipment, it would simply create lots of jobs.
Maybe I should edit the comment to say "... feed as many people as we do at the cost that we do..." because while it's true we can gain the same land productivity with less advanced equipment, it would seem that the total labor cost to do so would make overall food cost very high. Not to mention difficulties in hiring the quantities of people needed. I'm definitely not any sort of knowledgeable expert here, just thinking aloud.
We currently have massive unemployment, and low quality, toxic food. I think rather than giving everyone a "basic income" to purchase that inferior food, we should give them jobs producing better food, and the overall increased price of food wouldn't be any worse than the cost of UBI.
It looks like older videos were removed from the channel but when this first made the rounds (on twitter) a few days back there was a video of filling some reservoirs, and on the video there was a man on crutches. I assumed that'd be the father and why he's not operating machinery.
For a while now I've shifted my perception of farming; it's more administration and management now than anything else. I mean for crop seeding and harvesting a lot of farmers will hire a company to do it, instead of purchasing combines that are stationary for most of the year.
They can do simple stuff like steering in a straight line at a constant speed or offset from a previously driven path. They still require a driver in the seat and more complicated operations like for example: unloading into a grain cart from a combine still has to be done by the driver.
> unloading into a grain cart from a combine still has to be done by the driver.
Systems to have the combine take control of the tractor while unloading into the grain cart have been commercially available for a number of years now.
Yeah the autonomous driving was the least interesting part to me. It was everything else that was running semi-autonomously that I found fascinating, and the fact that they aren't integrated. That every piece of equipment has it's own screen.
Not everything has its own screen. The isobus standard has allowed one screen for years. It is easier to create your own screen than to use it. Also there is a lot to watch and so you sometimes want your own screen anyway just to ensure the important stuff is always in eyesight.
Farmers haven't been hard working in decades. There's a reason most farmers are obese, sitting isn't hard work. Even when I was a kid everyone around here still did square bales of hay and tossed them around by hand. Now it is 100% round bales handled with a loader. As everything got bigger, there was simply no possibility of human involvement because people can't lift 800 pounds.
To give you some perspective when I left the fertilizer business here in Central Michigan in 1999 the only monitor in most tractor cabs was the seed monitor. In combines maybe 2-3% of farmers had a yield monitor, probably 2-3X that in places like Illinois or Iowa.
I love it how people say farmers don't use technology!
I've read a lot of press where farmers are given as a prime example of people not using or comfortable with tech. The journalists writing it have no idea of what they're talking about. Yet it has become almost a meme.
I'm guessing that video is taken in the US since she is planting corn. Here is another video from Southern Saskatchewan. People might be interested in the equipment being used. Mike is quite an character. He works on a big operation, I think over 20k acres. The equipment he is using costs a fair bit of cash. The seeding system (para-link hoe drill) and tractor to pull it likely costs between 500k and 1m CAD. They have multiple units like that.
The video doesn't show too much of it but Mike's equipment a bunch of technology on it as well. Some of the stuff:
- auto section control: turns off/on seed & fertilizer automatically to minimize overlaps and prevent skips. On large machines (e.g. 80 ft) the cost of overlap is quite significant. The seed and fertilizer is carried by a pneumatic system and optimally tuning the system is a bit tricky (he shows a bit of that)
- auto rate control/variable rate control: with variable rate, the field is split into many zones and the applied rate of seed and fertilizer is optimized. That's a whole topic into itself, I won't explain here.
- population/blockage monitoring: this system monitors seed and fertilizer flow in the pneumatic delivery system and will alert the operator is something is wrong (blocked run, rate to high or low). That's the "Agtron" system he is talking about.
- I don't know if his para-link drill has it but there is a variable packing system available. That will monitor packer (the wheel behind the seed opener) and adjust packing pressure depending on field conditions. Wet areas of the field will need less down pressure compared to dry areas
- As is typical these days, GPS mapping, guidance. He has two different screens showing the map. The Deere screen doesn't show the individual on/off sections of the drill and so it shows more overlap. The Topcon screen (comes with drill) shows the sections.
- The system for controlling the metering on the drill is fairly advanced. For planters, it is typically more advanced yet (corn seed is really expensive and so very precisely metering it and placing it is key). On the Bourgault drill he is using, there is a variable speed hydraulic motor on the metering system with a feedback control loop to control the rate. Early in the video he is calibrating those meters so the system knows the mass-flow feedrate of the meter (e.g. RPM of meter -> lbs/min of material). That feedrate will be converted to a per-unit-area application rate. The variable rate prescription map will provide input to the rate controller.
Just some info in case people are interested. Running a profitable farm is a challenge and most farmers are aggressive in adopting any new technology that will help them get an edge.
> Here is another video from Southern Saskatchewan
You know he's from Saskatchewan because he pronounces Bourgault correctly! Are you from around here? I'm in Regina with a family farm about an hour north of here.
Yeah, I grew up not far from St. Brieux and the Bourgault plant. My father was one of the first farmers in the area to start using a "new fangled" air seeder system. That was back in the early 1980s. The machines have gotten a lot larger, more complicated and way more expensive since then.
Seems like a big opportunity for improved operator ergonomics would be some kind of open standard bus used for simple commanding - could be either electrical or software. This way, a set of "soft buttons" could be provided on the wheel or front panel which can be mapped to actions on accessory equipment, so that e.g. starting and stopping the seeder (and perhaps seeing its OK/NG status) could be done without having to reach around to its own controller.
This would be fairly simple to implement using a commodity serial bus if everyone could get together and agree on something, but I don't know if agricultural implements have enough of a vendor lock-in paradigm that e.g. the tractor manufacturer would be discouraged from building features to support third-party implements.
There is a problem safety. I work for John deere. We have some products that are not being developed because if they were some remote hacker could open the vavles on the anmoina tanks as the farmer is driving by a school and kill all 60 children out at recess. There are real dangers here, and things are going to get more locked down in the protocol over time to ensure that those scenarios don't happen.
The above is not about third parties. If we conclude we can trust you we will even give you a key to our cryptography. However trust will not be easy to establish.
I mean I agree, but it'd require a lot of backwards compatibility and a push to get rid of existing standards, which can take decades. I mean we don't even have a unified cable standard around computers / laptops yet. Ideally I'd be able to buy a new PC with only USB-C ports in it, but we're nowhere near that.
More importantly she is doing real work. She isn't promoting a brand or developing a line of clothes. If COVID has done anything good it has reminded us what matters. Who cares if you have 10 million followers, if all you "do" is promote brands. At least this lady is making food while getting followers because of her looks.
It still surprises me that modern agriculture doesn't seem to track each individual plant.
Surely in todays world, it's very cheap to simply have a bunch of cameras looking down at the plants, and track from each seed, to each plant, to each leaf on the plants, to how many cents that plant earned you.
When you have that kind of tracking, you can do things like "If a plant is within 30mm of a neighbour, we will earn more if we kill one plant and let the other grow. Kill whichever is currently smaller".
Or "if a plant is growing within 2 inches of a rock, give it these extra nutrients".
Treating each plant separately should give much higher yields.
Our current system is equivalent to a human medical system which doesn't inspect each patient individually, but instead just prescribes medications to entire towns!
It's more complicated than that. The optimum population to plant say corn varies by soil type. But some seeds don't respond well to high population. When planted tightly together the corn in the fall will have have thin stalks and lodge, ie fall down. Sure you can harvest it but anyone who has ever watched someone try soon realizes they have a lot of losses.
When I was an agronomist I tried with several seed companies to get that kind of information but they didn't want to provide it. I am not certain if that has improved or not.
Most farmers are using 'precision agriculture' and fertilizing by either 2.5 acre grid squares or grids within individual soil types.
I am pretty sure modern agriculture does a lot of this based on keeping track of everything (what's planted, how much fertilizer, weather, soil conditions, etc). I am not sure the last time you have been on a farm, but setting up a system of static cameras to constantly monitor every individual plant would be very expensive and I am doubtful that it would be any better then what is being done now.
Absolutely. I really, really wonder how you'd manage to get equipment in under the camera rig. All those cameras are going to look pretty tempting for the folks that normally just steal diesel, not to mention pretty silly flying around in bad weather.
By "camera rig", I'm talking twenty cameras spaced at 3 foot intervals. Each camera a basic VGA camera at 30 fps, and all hooked up to a cheap computer with a low range GPU to find plants.
Cameras cost: $1 each ($20).
Wiring: $2 each ($40).
Computer cost: $120 (inc 24v PSU).
GPU cost: $60.
That sort of equipment isn't going to be worth stealing.
And what would be the benefit? Financially I mean. What's the return on investment? And how does it apply to the thousands of square miles of farmland?
There are precision farming systems that (according to their marketing materials) will allow you to precisely spray fertiliser only at plants, and weedkiller only at weeds. This saves money on chemicals, and helps the environment through reduced run-off.
Of course, adoption isn't universal [1] - a large farm will see a much faster payback time for the same bit of equipment, for example. And many farms will have other priorities for their limited capital; tractor auto-steer is much more popular than precision weed control.
That would actually be a pretty difficult ask, you would have to cover the order of thousands of acers of land, spotty uplink service, supplying power or developing low power solution (also needs to be maintained by the farmers). Also, building a machine/implement to kill this or that plant would be pretty tough too. That's aside from the soil type and what kind of irrigation you're able to use.
It wasn't mentioned in the video, but you can get kinda close to what you're thinking today. When harvesting the crops it's possible create a map of the yield throughout the field. Then with combinations of random sampling of the soil throughout different parts of the field, one can adjust the fertilizer distribution thought the field. Finally, when you go to plant the crops next year, you can utilize this data to configure the planter to automatically space the plants a little closer or farther apart. Many farmers are already doing exactly this.
Every taken a statistics class? I recommend it, done right you can get good enough results with just a few samples. There is no need for 19,200,000 (6000 acres at 32000 plants per acre, reasonable numbers for a large corn grower) samples, you can't look at them all anyway. Turns out that farmer can get by with far less samples with the right analysis.
University and seed researchers sometimes do the plant by plant analysis you are taking about. They are looking at just a few hundred samples though and only getting slightly better data.
It's not specifically what you're talking about, but individual plant management is becoming more and more popular. It's done with drones - not the blade type but the wing type. They use multispectral cameras and interpretation that ends up showing you things like malnutrition, over/under watering, crop wear, disease, insect infestations etc.
There has been a similar thing for decades, from planes. But drones mean much more regular intervals and much higher resolutions.
This comment reminds me of a Mexican friend talking about farming in the town he grew up in. It's not that the farmland is necessarily poor, but it's uneven. To farm productively means knowing where and when to plant what. Problem is it doesn't mesh well with mechanization. At least currently.
Looks like a pretty bad user experience. I understand why you'd want that many screens, so all the data is visible, but they all look like they are built by different companies and with different types of screens and different styles of interface. Surely it must be hard to use?
How many different screens does the average startup engineer use? github/lab, CI, CRM, analytics, metrics reports, ad portal, etc.
It's all specialized tools for specialized jobs. Not a farmer, but my understanding is tractor supplies torque for whatever tools are being pulled behind it or attached onto it.
Yeah, one glance at that setup to me and you can tell it's modular on purpose. Farms like these use their tractors as modular platforms that they build to fit their specific needs.
IIRC there are / have been attempts to create unified interfaces, since a lot of the services offer APIs as well, but in practice those unified interfaces will never offer all the functionality and information available - you just can't keep up or manage all of it.
The user experience is a lot better than it was a few years ago but you are correct, it's a lot of screens. There are two screens for the tractor itself. The lower screen above throttle, displays and controls tractor related stuff. The screen above does GPS guidance and mapping (automatic steering). There is a screen from the planter tool. That does mapping as well and probably does seed (population) rate control. The small blue screen I think is for the fertilizer controller (separate system and manufacturer again). I guess the screen all the way to the right is also for the planting tool. Maybe monitors the tanks that store the seed and other planter properties. I'm not familiar with the planter she is using.
They have integrated some things over the past few years (ISOBUS is the standard communication protocol for integrating). There is a lot more integration that could be done but it requires a lot of cooperation between companies. Also, the tractor is a multi-purpose tool and in this case is being used for a very specific job. So, many of the screens apply only for the job she is doing.
This is the same situation in any number of industries where you can "mix & match" equipment. Even different products from the same company might have radically different UIs. Like anything else, it's not ideal, but you get used to it.
In my previous job, the same thing happened. In fact, one of our selling points was that we had a unified look and feel for all our equipment UI's. It made it easier for salespeople to demonstrate how buying our stuff could reduce training cost and error rates.
Ironically John Deere's experience was much better than many competitors, or at least it was for a very long time. Some competitors' cabs looked like the cockpit of a soviet era fighter jet, with everything controlled by a huge array of toggle switches.
"I could teach anybody, even people in this room, to be a farmer. It's a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn."
At the end of the year you get a gross profit of $0.016. From there you have to buy your seed ($0.04 each at your local hardware store), shovel, watering can...
Those numbers are only semi realistic. Your local hardware store probably only has sweet corn seed (what I priced) which will not yield as much as field corn, but it is worth more if you sell as sweet corn not field corn as most farmers are selling corn. I have no idea how to account for this important factor.
Mike Bloomberg hasn't heard of fertilizer, so I didn't bother pricing that, but to get the yield I quoted every year you need to replace what the corn takes out of the soil and that means fertilizer of some sort.
She is using a "planter". That is a quite expensive and complicated machine. It's used for crops that have expensive seeds or very precise planting requirements. Corn seed is expensive and a significant cost of growing the crop. So, you want to make the best use of the seed. A planter will meter out seeds one at a time and place them a fixed distance apart in the seed rows. Seed depth is also carefully controlled. Corn will yield better if plants are optimally spaced in the row. Less sophisticated seeding equipment (e.g. air drill, air seeder) will randomly space out seeds in the row. For lower cost seeds like wheat, that's typically good enough and it is a simpler machine.
Another difference is that planters typically have wider row spacings. For corn, that's not a problem because the plants want more space. However, for cereal crops like wheat, ideally the spacing should be smaller. Typically spacing for wheat might be 8 to 10 inches but even narrower might give optimal yield. To get narrow spacing, you need more seed rows and those get expensive given the complexity of the planter system (high cost per seed row).
In area she is farming, corn and soybeans are the major crops. There are a bunch of other field crops they might grow. Wheat is one but there are many others.
Example planter manufacturer (lots of other companies make them):
She has another video with soybeans and it's a pretty similar process. She said they adjusted a couple of things but were using the same tractor and seeder.
It looks relatively the same, can be similar (or more, or less) amount of screens. It all depends on what what model the tractor is (some only need one screen for control) and what attachments you have on. Some attachments have one or two screens, some have none. Even if you're in livestock, you have a screen for the tractor, likely screen for GPS guidance too. Perhaps a screen for stock management across fields etc.
The contractors for whom I originally took over apparently had a contract to write unit tests, probably for a certain amount of test coverage or something. There was a bunch of dead code buried that was only executed by the tests, apparently to bump up their unit test coverage. This was one of many such horrors. We ultimately told management that it was cheaper to rewrite the thing than it was to fix their backlog of "must have" bugfixes, and it was a huge success. Still didn't fix the radio issues, however.