So you say. And this crowd is probably more likely than average to do so. However would you really touch the engine - remember a mistake can destroy your engine, and there isn't much interesting there for the most part.

What you would do it connect to the CAN bus and read all the data there - same as what most people do for cars - except there is a lot more interesting data for you to work with. There is not need to root the tractors, or install different software, just install your own computer, connect it to the CAN bus and do what you want. Our 10 year old computers that do this on a 200mhz CPU sell for $5000 - I'm convinced you would want something more modern that is also cheaper for your experiments.

There is one exception to the above: if you want to do computer steering you need an encryption key that we don't generally make available to the public. There is too many safety concerns to let us just give that away.