Browsing by study line "Agroteknologia"

Modern agricultural tractors produce a large amount of information for controlling various functions of the tractor and farming implements. By including location data to the measurements, the data obtained can be used, for example, to study the conditions in the field or the tractor's work cycle. The development of telematics systems should aim at completely automated solutions. ISO 11783 defines the transmission of data both within the tractor and between the tractor and the implement, implemented using the CAN (Controller Area Network). It is also possible to monitor the desired information such as fuel consumption and engine load, as well as the needed draft force. Farming implements and tractors whose data transfer complies with an international standard are called ISOBUS machines. The aim of the study was to develop a cost-effective telematics system that can be used to monitor and record arable farming activities in real time. In accordance with the objectives, the requirements of the measuring equipment were determined for decoding and recording the messages of the CAN bus of the tractor. The tractor's CAN bus data was recorded using a Raspberry Pi microcomputer with CAN bus and GNSS measurement cards. The system was used to collect predefined tractor data from the bus, which was sent with location data in real time over the mobile phone network to a server computer. The measurement hardware and the server computer were programmed using the Node-RED programming tool. The information received on the server computer was stored in a MySQL database. Node-RED was also used to create a graphical user interface, from which any user could monitor the tractor's functions and location in real time and control the storage of data in the database. Testing of the measurement system was carried out at the Viikki research farm of University of Helsinki during the summer of 2023. The implemented measurement system successfully collected data on two tractors for different work tasks during silage harvesting. Retrieving and analysing the collected data from the database was easy, as the CAN messages were in a decoded format. The transfer of data between the measuring device and the server computer took place without any major delays. The telematics system could also be used for automatic real-time data analysis. Research shows that the CAN bus is a good way to gather information about farming field operations. In the future, the exploitation of measured data will be an essential part of agricultural practice, which aims both to improve the profitability of agriculture and to reduce its environmental impact.

Soil structure is one of the key elements when it comes to plant growth and yield production. For the last 30 years, the agricultural machines have grown in size, which has increased the stress to soil caused by the machinery. When the stress is high enough to increase the strengths in soil, and the porosity and permeability are decreased, the soil is compacted. There are some soil scanners, which are capable of mapping the soil strengths. The aim of this study was to use the draft data from the CAN bus in this purpose. The topsoil strength data could be then used as part of precision agriculture,for example in problem solving with low-yield areas, and as part of variable depth tillage purposes. The goal for this study was to build a measurement system, which could record the draft data of a tractor and also to find out the usability of this data in precision agriculture. Measurements of the reference data (electric conductivity, organic matter) are also part of this study, which included initialization of the Veris iScan+ and also the development and building the subframe for the scanner. As the measurement system Raspberry Pi minicomputer equipped with CAN bus and GNSS boards was used. The measurement system was programmed with Python programming language. In the measurements, a Valtra N141 tractor and a Kverneland Turbo 2 cultivator were used to tillage the two-hectare test plot. After the measurements, MATLAB and ArcGis were used for processing the raw data, mapping the features, and analysing the data. In this study, the implement draft was found to be significantly higher in the headlands of the field, which face the most field traffic. In the test plot, there were three individual zones with high draft force values, each resulting from different reasons. These zones were visible in the EC and OM maps, but all of the draft force variation could not be explained by the reference data. According to this study, the CAN bus draft data could be used as topsoil strength indicator, and with the right reference data the draft data can be used to map the topsoil compacted areas.