Any Electronics Gurus Out There?

   / Any Electronics Gurus Out There? #101  
I would like to know how a scope can read USB data. You can see that data is there and levels are OK. Read it? No way.

Go on E-Bay. Stuff from China. Complex and often high quality electronics are dirt cheap. No reason, why there couldn't be inexpensive Laser and GPS consumer equipment. I guess, the thing is, that only the DIYer would buy it as there is ZERO support.
 
   / Any Electronics Gurus Out There?
  • Thread Starter
#102  
There are plenty of cheap lasers online but sure don't see anything cheap in the way of GPS guidance equipment. Maybe I'm not looking in the right places.
 
   / Any Electronics Gurus Out There? #103  
The 12VDC linear actuators I have played with for the home gamer are way to slow to use

Takes 30 seconds to cycle 12 inches to close my chicken coop door

It would be a cool project to take on but I don't have the time

If you can find someone to do it as a passion project, you'll be in luck but as for paying someone, good luck
 
   / Any Electronics Gurus Out There? #104  
There are plenty of cheap lasers online but sure don't see anything cheap in the way of GPS guidance equipment. Maybe I'm not looking in the right places.

Upthread I posted about the U-blox DGPS units. Those are $400 and you need two. However, the base station only needs to be within 5-6 miles of the moving one so you could conceivably have multiple applications sharing the same base station, which drives the cost down.

U-blox is a chip manufacturer and those units are meant to demonstrate the abilities of their DGPS chips. A lot of the cost is the communications support and packaging. You can also buy just the chip here: NEO-M8P series | u-blox . The minimum quantity is 100 and at that quantity they are $82.25 each; chips tend to get much cheaper at higher volumes. If you were building your own product it would presumably already have some way of communicating with the outside world so you could just drop the chip in. That's pretty cheap to add GPS location to a product, especially if you already have the base station.

They also have a newer version that starts at $167 ZED-F9P module | u-blox . They claim 1-centimeter accuracy in all three dimensions for the newer version.

We're going to be seeing this stuff in consumer products very soon.
 
   / Any Electronics Gurus Out There?
  • Thread Starter
#105  
I noticed that the C94-M8P packaged unit has onboard radio receiver. What other electronic components would be needed to come up with an auto steering unit for a tractor, for example? I also noticed that the board will interface with Arduino.
It seems that there would be market for low end consumer grade auto steer using components such as this.
 
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   / Any Electronics Gurus Out There? #106  
I would dig auto steer just for mowing

Software would be the biggest boundary there I think
 
   / Any Electronics Gurus Out There?
  • Thread Starter
#107  
Yes! I ran a Deere tractor with auto steer and a 15' batwing mower over several hundred acres of field grass last year. You just have to experience it to appreciate it. It would be valuable even when applying lawn fertilizer, spraying etc to avoid skips and overlaps. I definitely see a future for consumer grade GPS "farmer" apps.
This is not to mention reading TBN while doing these operations. :)
 
   / Any Electronics Gurus Out There? #108  
I would dig auto steer just for mowing

Software would be the biggest boundary there I think

The thing about software is it's expensive to develop, but once it's done it costs essentially nothing to copy.
 
   / Any Electronics Gurus Out There? #109  
I noticed that the C94-M8P packaged unit has onboard radio receiver. What other electronic components would be needed to come up with an auto steering unit for a tractor, for example? I also noticed that the board will interface with Arduino.
It seems that there would be market for low end consumer grade auto steer using components such as this.

This is the $64 trillion dollar question. If all you want to do is track your location and your desired location and manipulate the steering and throttle to get there, it's pretty simple. You need a person on board to avoid running into things you don't want to run into, whether it's a person who wanders into your way, a ditch, a muddy spot, another tractor, whatever. Putting in sensors that can detect all of those things is somewhere between really hard and impossible. This is what's holding up self-driving cars. Making them go is easy, it's making them stop -- when you need them to -- is hard.
 
   / Any Electronics Gurus Out There? #110  
That is very interesting stuff! The farmers are using RTK, as I'm sure you know, for sub inch auto steer accuracy, but it comes at a much higher price than $400/$800. One of the local RTK installations (Real Time Kinetics) has the base station mounted atop the local "high rise" grain elevator to cover a large portion of the valley. The good thing is that several farmers can share one base to minimize cost for auto steer and other GPS apps . I think there is a pending market for consumer grade auto steer for lawn mowers and fertilizer spreaders. (Not sure how the robo mowers work) A GPS controlled lawn fertilizer applicator with auto shut off is not far fetched, in my opinion.

I'm an old machinist who became acquainted with NC (Numerical Control) back in the late sixties in a machining environment. We used punched tape to control the milling and drilling of holes etc as there were no micro computers back then. It later morphed into CNC (Computer Numberical Control) and prices stated dropping dramatically to the point where hobbyists could afford it. CNC wood routers are common today and I have used mine extensively for producing components for the Palen Archtop Guitars shown at the link below. (Shameless plug but I actually quit building them in 2012.)

What I'm getting at is there seems to be a corollary between the CNC and GPS that keeps popping up for me as time goes on. You mentioned "Drive around the field and every few seconds log your location and elevation" and that is basically what I did to one of my hand carved archtop back and top plates to get it into electronic format. The archtop plates start out about 1" thick and end up as a carved contour about 3/16" thick. Digitizing the carved plate (spruce or maple) involved mounting an electronic probe into the spindle of the CNC router and traversing the entire surface in a grid of points about 1/16" to 1/4" apart and taking elevation readings at each. This created an electronic file that could be read into the PC creating a point cloud and generating a surface in turn. This surface could then be viewed on the screen and tweaked as desired and even a solid model could be created.

Sorry to ramble but but it seems that there is a tremendous opportunity out there for consumer grade GPS apps.

Edit: Forgot to mention that the CNC router could then be used to machine subsequent parts eliminating much of the labor intensive hand carving.

CNC is a good analogy. Think of what the control logic has: it has a map of where it wants the cutting head to go. It has a way of measuring the current location of the cutting head, and a way of sending instructions to move it. The control process is read the map and get the next location. Keep reading the head position and sending instructions until it is at that location. Then get the next location. Repeat until done.

For controlling grading you need the same three things: a "map" of what it's supposed to look like, a way of measuring where the blade is, and a way of putting it where it should be. Plus control logic to pull it all together. In the original question the "map" is simple, the area is just supposed to be level. But as I think about this -- and at the risk of hijacking the thread -- if you really can get centimeter precision in three dimensions with DGPS that would be the way to go. Not only could you get an area flat, you could make any kind of profile you wanted, really only limited by the capabilities of the blade and the qualities of the soil.
 

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