Has anyone considered laying tile with AoG and/or OpenGrade? I don’t know much about it but I’m hoping to start doing some as time and money allow. Some guys survey the next path as they drive back to the start. What would be the ideal setup?
1 Like
I have worked a little bit on OpenGrade and added some features to make it able to lay tile, although my main use is for leveling, but have not tried laying tile in real conditions.
Yes you will have to drive the path with the tool just above ground, then draw the line in the window, and then OpenGrade should be able to follow the line.
I added some features like setting the distance to be viewed under the ground to draw the tile and the possibility to move the whole line up and down.
Right now it miss a feature to save each pass for future reference and it have no build-in ntrip.
Maybe @kansasfarmer have worked with. He used Brian’s original version for laying tile I think.
I have not be able to test my OpenGrade3D, way to much rain here this fall, so I didn’t extensively tested the valve control, be seamed to work fine the few minutes I tested it this summer.
I used OpenGrade to make a 150ft trench with my excavator to lay a tile in the yard and it ended great.
1 Like
have made only limited use. I installed my swiftnav system on another farmers home built tile plow for a few weeks. He lays 2 inch pipe around the two ft depth range. This spring we just manually adjusted depth with tractor SCV. Now that auto valve control is available we are in the process of adding a valve. Really excited to see how this pans out. Yes we followed ground contour with plow and then drew line following ground contour making sure always had minium slope. then just held at a minus 24 or adjusted antenna offset by 24 inch and held at zero. A feature that would draw a line with min and max depth and min slope would make it more like commercial systems. 
What kind of depth control do you have on the plow? Is it some support wheels controlling the depth? We just had some tile laid with an Inter Drain plow and there they also control the slope of the plough itself as it “bites” into the subsoil, so there’s up/down and the tilt control on the plow linkage.
Another things I’m always wondering with the tile drainage in North America is that you just use only the plain pipe with no filler material like gravel around the pipe? How do you keep the tile from getting clogged with soil material?
1 Like
@nut Its just a 3 point mounted plow with a seperate parralell link and cylinder behind it. Its just a 3 inch wide plow putting in 2 inch tile at relatively shallow depth. Yes ive seen the double parralel linkages were one is offset so angle of attack can be changed. That would take a whole nother circuit in OG to do that
I really dont know much about tile. but yes its very rare to see field tile bedded in pea gravel around here. not sure why. Now was your INO able to run an on/off valve or just a proportional. Once we get it running again this fall ill post some pictures. Or maybe a video.
1 Like
It’s for propo, but it works with on/off as well by setting the min/max PWMs in OG, the settings are there in Pat’s version. Have on/off on my blade and just done dry testing so far but seems to work decently.
1 Like
Thank you! I’ve been wondering when someone would pick up where open grade left off. I can’t wait to try it. We use the old intellislope for tiling. Works well, but obsolete, not supported anymore. Would like another alternative that doesn’t involve $11,000+. Do you use same controller for prop valve as steer motor?
1 Like
Yes Cytron MD13S connected with Arduino Nano. Can be used for both prop and on/off valve. Relay should not be used, they will burn out real quick.
Here we use 100mm dia pipe. We put never any kind to materal. Plain pipe with 1.8mm slots in clay soil and 3mm slot with 450um filter in sandy soil. It’s recommended for coarse sand but work fine almost anywhere.
Distance is mostly 15 m (12 to 20) depth 1-1.3m
15 year ago only the 100um filter was available for sandy soil but it really brake the water flow.
type 2- 1.8mm sluice
type 3- 3mm sluice
Here is one with an excavator, he does a great job, his plow is very stable. But there also some amateurs!
He has a laser on this but now he use GPS (trimble I think), laser only when very low slops.
I think it makes sense to build the slope control for leveling and/or tile with PWM only, as you said there’s trouble with the relays and then you have flexibility on the hydraulic side. And with external 5V supply to the arduino, you can use the manual mode without a PC connected.
I’ve been in the cab quite a few hours with the contactor I use to see bit how the whole thing works, they still use laser even though they have RTK GPS to map the drains, he said the dealer guys (at Trimble I guess) never got round to making the GPS work, which sound quite odd. So they set the drains at a certain grade after mapping the fields with an ATV with RTK GPS. One summer I was on the cheap and mapped myself with the GPS receiver in the backpack. 35 hectares walking with 10 meter spacing in the sun 
What I think is crucial is that the plow can keep the grade and no valleys or high points appear in the pipe, not so much the absolute mm accuracy. The only repairs we’ve had to do have been where the plow has hit some really heavy subsoil and sort of bounces off, mostly on soft peat ground with really stiff clay beneath. So you end up with something like this:
As for pipe, it looks pretty similar here as well, 65 mm pipe all the way for the drains here and then anything between 80-200 mm for the main branches. The coated option here is with a coconut fibre that’s maybe 5-10 mm thick around the pipe or then the filter cloth is typically applied on the fly with sort of a wrapping device, but I’d say 95% still done with pipe + gravel. Spacing around the same, 10-15 meters depending on soil. Gravel we’ve used around 10 tonnes per 100 meters as a rule of thumb.
Here the 4"(100mm) pipe are cheaper than the 3"(75mm)! That’s because no more 3" are buried here. This give really some room for height error, 25mm or even 50mm will not plug the pipe.
Here more than 75% of the fields are tilled, many farmers have 100% of their fields tilled. The big trend now is GPS levelling.
If someone ask why tilling before levelling: Tilling is for lower the water table and closing all the ditches making decent size fields. Levelling is only to improve the water absorption over larger parts of the field and evacuate the excess to the boundary. The fastest way to dry the field here is to have the water going down to the till instead travelling on the surface to the trench. No need to refill soil moisture here! It’s always raining! 
Here is what we mostly used, with the 450um filter:
Is the filling material intended for improving the absorption rate or to retain the soil?
Here the pipe absorption is always high enough, it’s the water travel speed in the soil limiting the efficiency.
Hi
I have added some features to Opengrade to make it suitable for laying tile
It can now record multiple swaths per fields, show visual reference lines to help drawing the cut line and invert survey path.
There is a text file and a kml file for the swaths.
I have not tried much but should work.
Still no built-in Ntrip and no documentation 
3 Likes
so i can record another survey path on the same job without deleting old survey and cut line?
1 Like
So I had to go back to test it to see what is saved! 
It will not save the survey path. It will record the actual vehicle position with his actual height as “realPassAltitude”, it will also add the closest survey altitude as “altitude” and the closest cut line as “cutAltitude”.
You press the record button to start or stop recording then you press save(in blue) or erase (the eraser) before making a new path.
You can also always leave the recording on and just push the eraser to clear the recording at the beginning of the path and the record button at the end of the path.
So no when you record a new survey path the old is lost, like before. The only new thing is that you can keep a record of the tool position (tile position) in a nice file.
1 Like
Ah now i understand
So if I get this right, analog lever lets you take control of blade, or leveling equipment?
Raise = raise blade and turn off auto control
lower = lower blade and turn on auto control
Very cool good work!!
I only know enough about programming to be dangerous. Is there a way to copy/ paste the ntrip from AOG?
Even better run AOG in background and feed ntrip rtk to opengrade.
I have been searching for a way to get ntrip corrections to send to another device from ublox F9P. (intellislope by Gradient)
I know everything is a lot more complicated than it seems.
Thanks,
Kevin
1 Like
Maybe you could use esp32-xbee as a ntrip client?
@nut did it for OpenGrade 3D see commits on sept 20 to 22 2020 here, it would be possible to do it for OpenGrade but I don’t have time and skill for it.
If someone give a try I will check at it and make it work, I think it’s about adding classes to Opengrade from AGO, something way above my skills.
It would be nice to have built-in Ntrip, I have a lot of problems (connection loose) with bluetooht from my phone.
I am also just good enough in coding to be dangerous! Probably my projects have a lot of bad programming but they seem to work 
Much appreciated. I don’t fully understand it yet. I will have to do some more studying on it. It is definitely headed the direction I’ve been trying to go.
Best regards,
Kevin
Should be pretty OK to copy/paste to opengrade now as it’s mostly same codebase as OG3D. There were quite a few dependencies and missing libraries when I put it to OG3D from AOG 4.
Should we think about merging the two opengrades?
You can stream RTK-corrected position data from any Bluetooth or Wifi enabled GPS receiver by first connecting to the GPS receiver with an Android device with an app called Lefebure NTRIP Client. There you can make any normal NTRIP config and also enable this RTK corrected position to be a “Mock location”. You may need to allow Lefebure NTRIP client to be used as a Mock location app in developer options.
Now, with RTK corrected position usable in any of your phone’s app, you can use for example an App called “Share GPS”, where you can again distribute this position via>
- Bluetooth
- TCP/IP
- USB
I was able to connect to a Wifi-receiver even through Windows based Android emulator “Bluestacks” and make this position available for any app with and without RTK correction.
Also, if you have a Wifi or Bluetooth equipped receiver and want to convert/bridge the stream to some other carrier TCP (server or client), BLE, classic Bluetooth, UDP then you can use an app called “BT/USB/TCP Bridge Pro”. That’s a very agile way of at least testing different setups and to convert data from one protocol to another with the use of any Android-device.
1 Like