Tool Steering

Sure will, I’m pretty excited as the camera guidance for row cropping is over $30k US. This should be much more accurate!

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Will you be running two tablets in the tractor
then?
And how will you be tool steering the planter?

Yes, two surface pro 7’s. The hitch guidance will be portable to swap the 3 point hitch and guidance from tractor to tractor.

The hitch is a Navigator slider 3 point hydraulic hitch. Going to make a draw bar attachment for the hydraulic hitch to pull my 100 foot draw bar sprayer and have tool guidance for it also.

Mark, would you happen to know which hydraulically adjustable 3pt hitch has the most travel? I know there’s the Navigator, Buffalo, Sukup, and others. I know there are steering hitches and that’s not what I want. This isn’t 3pt country so I’ve never really seen or worked with one.

One day I’d like to use one for implement steering of my trailed type planter. I guess I’d be welding a drawbar onto it.

Here’s a couple pages I have book marked with homemade drawbar steer, also an option but nothing looks easier than just buying a sliding 3pt hitch system from bigIron.

https://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=544292&mid=4473128#M4473128Q
https://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=615207&mid=5141907

I honestly don’t know travel distance of each. The navigators are really accessible around here as nobody uses them anymore. They’re 20 inches total travel.

People think the tractor can offset the implement until your running over rows with tractor and the implement is running over another set of rows. Also curves are a problem for that too. The implement hitch should make up for the offset much quicker and accurately.

So this makes me curious. Assuming you have a 3 point hitch mounted planter that uses discs to open a seed trench I am of the opinion that it is very difficult to steer a planter with a sliding hitch because the opener discs act as stabliser discs and prevent lateral movement from a side shift frame. So i am wondering how you plan on reliably steering the planter without a steering hitch that changes the length og the hitch arms in order to change the angle of the tool bar in relation to the tractor which makes the tool bar swing left and right as it tracks throught the ground.
But possibly you are using a drawn planter and will pull it behind your navigator on a draw bar.

Yes, it is a 2 point drawn planter that trails behind. I’m going to make a 3 point adapter for tongue hitch implements also. Ultimately this is for a 3 point mount cultivator where I will probably have to pull the two discs off that were meant for the other style of steering hitch. @m_elias and I got it working yesterday. It holds about .3 inch accuracy down the bumpy road at 8 mph! I will be posting update here once I have it working in the field this spring.

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Any chance this will be an option in upcoming updates? Im needing passive steering at the moment.

I want tool steering setup next spring too! hopefully it will be supported in ag open gps so that i can run it as well as autosteer from a single computer!

also need hardware nudge buttons for autosteer. :slight_smile:

Please tell more about the need for hardware nudge buttons. I thought nudge is only needed if RTK was not used. Frequent need for nudge sounds like driving without auto-steer and using buttons instead of the steering wheel.

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I can do some input here.
It is very handy, using autosteer when rowcultivating. Crop has been planted with rtk autosteer, but the sidedraft, make the rows deviate + - 10 cm due to shifting sidehill direction across the field. To avoid the tractor driving on the crop some of the way, I use nudge 5 cm many times pr. turn.
The cultivator (row spacing 25 cm) have camera and sidesteer, but you really take tension of arms and shoulders using autosteer for tractor as well.

Yes, i would use a hardware nudge button on row crop cultivating too. crop was planted with RTK, but when cultivating, that nudge button would get lots of use!

Same need for me! Seeding with RTK on the planter and use the nudge button all the time when cultivating ( but it is very hard to touch the right part of the screen while looking backward!)

So the problem here is the planter not always following the tractor. Wouldn’t tool steering for the planter be a better solution if it was available?

I understand compensating side drift makes sense if autosteer on RTK is not good enough because of planter drift. In this case nudge is only needed when sidedraft changes. I still feel fixing the root issue would be a better solution.

PS. does any commercial system have external nudge switches?

Yes i run RTK auto steer on Fendt Vario guide currently with a camera guide cultivator. Beings i have a lot of side hills and a trailed planter with no tool steering function then the actual planted rows can be as much as 9 inches off the RTK guidance line. So nudging is very much part of the days work while cultivating.
This is why i so much want passive steering for the planter, to steer the tractor off the line uphill inorder to get the globe on the planter as close to the line as possible. Tool steering is not a cheap or easy solution for the planter we run its a trailed cart with a mounted planter behind the cart axle.

Im not a programer so i dont know the background challenges but i would question that if JD is doing Passive steering already and Fendt is working at bringing it out, then the aligorithim should also be possible in AOG. Is it not just a function of calculation based on known measurments between GPS antennas, ground contact points and pivot points? With either a dual globe or IMU corrected reciver on planter and on tractor, then have the ability to select which reciver point you want to keep on the line.

It’s definitely possible. Anything is. But there’s never enough time.

Remember that all of us were non-programmers at one time!

Passive implement steering means it’s just the tractor steering off track so that the implement is on track? If it’s to compensate for slope, I think you can use the “Sidehill Deg per Deg of Roll” to push the tractor up the side hill.

If you’re experiencing variable implement side-to-side fluctuations (this is my experience with row crops, varying soil conditions), I don’t think passive steering will be quick enough to help anything, it would need to preemptively counter steer. I played with actively steering our planter a couple years ago using a 2nd tablet with a 2nd AOG, controlling the swinging drawbar on the tractor with a gps ant on the planter. This worked pretty good as long as the ±7" of travel on the drawbar was enough. Even better would have been to include an IMU on the planter to help compensate when going through water drains.

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@m_elias i ended up using your help this spring and summer with our 3 point navigator steer hitch. It worked awesome with dual antenna on the planter and row crop cultivator all summer. Had Kult Kress finger weeders on the cultivator and ran every day with my arms crossed in the tractor. Steering on implement was more accurate then the tractor rtk. 2 separate systems like you did, but simple. 2 tablets side by side and only had to nudge the cultivator a few times.

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