Browsing by Subject "käyttäjätutkimus"

Grain drying requires a lot of work and monitoring on farms during harvesting season. The amount of work required on dryers could be reduced with the help of an appropriate automation solution. It could also be possible to reduce drying expenses with accurate control. Grain dryers are often very different. Even between batch type dryers there are lots of differences. Variation between different dryers is caused by different sizes, fan counts and heating methods. Sometimes the dryers are also expanded with new silos, elevators or dividers. For these reasons versatile and adaptive automation solutions are needed on grain dryers. There are often also differences between the users of the dryers. Users can be young or old and their habits and experiences of the use of automation could be very different. For this reason, user interfaces made for controlling grain dryers should be user friendly and versatile. It is also profitable to develop user interfaces for grain dryers because it increases customer satisfaction and reduces calls to customer services. The aim of this study was to develop a new automation control system and user interface for grain dryers manufacturing company Antti-Teollisuus Oy located in Salo. The automation was required to be easily adaptable and reliable. The user interface was required to be user-friendly. User research was used in aid of development and it also gave us a picture what kind of user interface farmers would prefer. Automation was programmed at the same time as the user research and the user interface were being developed. 10 dryers were deployed for the first season in 2018. 12 more dryers were deployed for the second season in 2019. The same control system was installed on every dryer despite their structural differences. Different bugs were fixed from the system during the deployments. The fault reports given by farmers later aided us in finding problems, fixing problems and developing the system. With help of an end survey and farmer feedbacks we got more references of the level of success of the development. From the feedbacks we could conclude that the user research was useful, and we achieved the objectives we set for the system. This study could be useful in development of new automation systems and user interfaces for grain dryers. In future automation systems could have better combability between each other and the data collected by the systems could be used to automatically find better control variables.