I think the best way is to mount a WAS on the plough to measure plough width and use tractors distance from line from Agopen. No need to measure real plough position, just measure plough position of preveous pass from tractor gps. Then adjust plough width using distance from line.
This wil need programming to implement this in agopen to be able to readout the plough was value, translate the was value into cm plough width, and a sub menu in agopen to calibrate things.
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Agreed, this is how commercial plough control tools work (my self-made tool too) but I don’t think this is what tool steering within agopen is currently planned to do. Perhaps a future feature to be discussed under a different thread?
I think that’s correct, the tool steering will be second gps receiver to steer the tool completely separate from the tractor which isn’t the way to go for plough control .
Maybe a separate app like opengrade could do the trick or an aditional form within agopengps
Can i ask why tool steering with an extra antenna wouldn’t work? The only challenge is how do you mount an antenna on frame that flips.
From what i understand the tractor just follows the furrow from the previous pass and the tool gets steered to try and minimize the error on subsequent passes. Is this correct?
I like the idea of tool steering but I’m a bit confused about the details, does the tractor steering still do the most part like the turns and then the tool steering does define tuning like the last 6 in to a foot once you’re going straight?? Had a chance to meet black ace yesterday with his open grade. X he has one hell of a program there and he is using ESPs to send GPS from the scraper to the cab. Looks like a simple way to shoot GPS back to the cab from say an implement. Also, the ESPs act like a router and DHCP IPs for your little network makes the UDP super simple, might be a great way to add a GPS to the whole setup for tool steering.
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Brian, you are correct. It would be even better to steer the plough with it’s own antenna because regular systems steering on tractor antenna are always one furrow behind…
I think te reason they do so is to reduce costs of second antenna (and implementation into system) and as you said, the challenge to mount an antenna that flips.
I thought about using two antennas on plow, one for each side, and switch antenna when rotating plow. But the signal would be lost when switching, and takes a while to get stable again.
You need an arm connected to linear actuator that flips it the opposite way as the plow turns and keep the antenna pointing up.
Yes the “tool position steering by using tractor position error” type steering takes several passes to correct line wiggles. It is like they take half or more the error and try to “fix” it on that pass. Kind of works like a very slow multipass integral is maybe a guess how it works. You don’t want to go too far too quickly and overshoot the correction.
It would just take some software to get that long time error and steer the plow accordingly - bit closer - bit farther and eliminate the error
I’d like to see how the antenna would be installed to a reversible variable width plough. It should not only be solid but also point straight up or it should come with a tilt sensor (if the antenna was at a decent height to give proper visibility behind the tractor).
In my first response at this thread I said tool steering would work but I still don’t consider it worth in this specific application. We have quite a few members running plough control, come and see how it works with the tractor antenna. Plough control indeed runs one pass late but in practise it is impossible to see any error even if I usually use 2 cm hysteresis to reduce mechanical stress on the plough width control parts. Using “fan mode” one would otherwise end up continuous adjustments as the width changes continuously from one headland to the other.
that is true, I did my plough adjustment by hand looking at agopengps screen and corrected for errors more than 3 cm. Looked perfectly straigth. So should not be that precise how much is corrected by the system. A few centimeters error is impossible to see.
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Maybe with an helix antenna, mounted horizontal on the back of the plough, or make a “tilt unit” on the back, connected with a bike brake cable and housing to the head of the plough
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Helix on a small rod tacked off the pivot point. The pivot stays in one orientation right? Only seen reversing ploughs of fs22, live in the middle of no till country.
Helix Antennas deal with shedding dust very well, would be a good choice for implements.
For plough use crosstrack error and was sensor. And few hydraulic parts. I think that should do the trick.
I guess you mean WAS on the plough, measuring the plough width? In addition to a few hydraulic parts some SW is needed, different from the tool steering approach (I guess still simple for our SW gurus).
Just wondering if the ToolSteer program is developed enough to try in real world yet?
I have AOG running in my tractor and have bought a hydraulic hitch (protrakker) that I want to get up and running in the next couple of days. Initially I was going to run the hitch with another tablet but if this version is working that would be amazing.
A few questions about setting up ToolGPS - is it using the autosteer board or will I need to make another ToolSteer board that I am guessing would look very similar to the autosteer board? (I am currently using KaupoiMOD v4_1)
and if so
I notice the ino for ToolSteer in the support folder is USB, is there a UDP version I haven’t found yet?
Also I haven’t seen how to add the ToolSteer board to AgIO?
This is a game changer for how we farm here in Western Australia. Chasing moisture from previous years furrows where the furrow has captured the moisture and held by the higher organic content of old root system over our hot and dry summers. To buy an off the shelf system to do the job is very expensive!
update: I found by making the AgIO dialogue box bigger to the right it revealed the tool gps and board connection boxes, looks like I have answered my own question, I will get to building another board.
Its a real hodge podge mess of ideas. But if you want to a deep dive, some are actually trying it.
A quick feedback from the field about our double AOG set up for seeding in slopes (one aog for the tractor, an other for the tool with discs steered at the back of the implement, two tablette in cab). It works very well: the tool was at maximum +- 3cm in side slopes up to 14°! The goal is to be able to use the setup for hoeing 
. I’m very happy with it and hope the tool steering will be in a release soon. All in one tablette will be more easy!
At the moment I’m in USB but I will convert all the set up to udp to make it more robust & maybe with panda later (6 usb plug and always one having an issue!).
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Hello AGOpenGPS community !
I’m about to equip a hoe to guide it.
Do you have the block diagram or how this feature works?
Thank you !!
hello，Why can’t I find the tool steel in module 5.6?
Hi,
I built a basic panda board (f9p + cmps+ teensy) in UDP, I would have liked to use it on my seed drill as a GPS tool. Only I can’t add it as a tool, every time I connect in AGio it becomes the main antenna.
What can I do ?
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Set udp source port to 10000
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