This post may be a little too hick for some of you, but it's no joke - it's insanity. Prepare yourselves for another case of producers using the general populace's lack of tech knowledge to exploit consumers in ridiculous, unethical ways.
Whilst visiting my parents on the farm these past few weeks, my Dad told me about a piece of electronic equipment he'd lost for a piece of machinery. Apparently being a computer science student makes me a master of all things even remotely technology related.
But all that aside, you know those big round-bales of hay? Yeah, like the ones in the above picture.They get wrapped in white plastic for preservation's sake, leaving them looking like huge marshmallows in the fields.
The wrapping machine that puts that plastic on essentially picks up a bale; places it on a spinning platter; and spins, the bale pulling the plastic around itself like if you grabbed the end of the toilet paper roll in the bathroom and started spinning in circles.
Long story short, my Pop needed the little electronic display that shows how many times the bale has been spun so that you know how thick of a layer of plastic is on the bale.
Cost on the only online source as well as at the machinery dealership? - over $1100 (part # 9). So I what did I say?
"Fuck that."
I'm no electrical/mechanical engineer, but I do know that engineers generally count the rotations of an object using a Hall effect sensor. You throw a magnet on the what ever is spinning, and each time it passes a Hall effect sensor the sensor acts like a switch and allows current to flow past. I Googled the schematics and this is exactly how the piece of machinery worked.
So I bought some stuff:
- a knock-off Arduino Uno
- a 7-segment LED display from Adafruit
- DC-DC power converter to step-down and regulate the tractor battery's power
- A few toggle buttons off of Ebay
- A blade-fuse holder
- A tube of epoxy to seal the project box
For a grand total of: $40
I scavenged a few resistors from an old TV for pull-down on the buttons, and a project box. I had never done any Arduino/ microcontroller work before, but I built it in 2 days using the most basic of online Arduino tutorials.
$1000? The thing is basically a button-press counter that I'm certain costs well-under $10 to manufacture. Ridiculous!
Anyway, there is a shift going on in agricultural machinery from mechanical to electronic devices. If anyone has a knack for (electronic) hacking out there, some of those machines are pretty damn cool and you could certainly make a good buck building your own, reasonably-priced solutions.
If anyone, within the next 60 years, anywhere, stumbles across this blog while looking for the same thing, contact me and I'd be happy to give a schematic or even build/ship one for an actually reasonable price.