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Comment by OldHand2018 | Hacker News Reader

OldHand2018

> Auto-steer systems that leverage machinery that already exists.

That links to a company selling a retrofit system for 7500 Euro and no annual fees. That's super cheap compared to buying a new tractor and I hope they are successful. But...

My brother-in-law hobby farms a few hundred acres of corn and soybeans and built an autosteering system for his 1950s tractor. The only thing he bought new was an Arduino board to tie it all together. Everything else was used farming equipment and his total cost was less than $1000 (USD). He's not even a programmer, just an engineering degree from Flyover State U. He cobbled together open source software to make it work.

The traditional farmer is very resourceful. They aren't going to allow your company much margin if they can do even part of it themselves. Good luck to VC-backed firms.

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> an engineering degree from Flyover State U

Looking at the US News and World Report rankings, 5 of the top 12 schools might (depends how you count Pittsburgh and Austin and) qualify as "Flyover State U." There's a huge range of schools in flyover states, and there are some very well-regarded engineering schools there.

I think parent meant that the schools that folks who work in ag go to tend to be "ag and mining" type schools, most of which are not state flagships.

IME that's true at least int he midwest. Most people I've met who work in ag in the midwest did not attend Madison/Ann Arbor/UIUC/etc. They attended places like SIU-E, UW-Whitewater, Minnesota @ Rochester, etc. Usually because those schools were like 1/2 of the price and closer to home.

And what parent said was also true -- those schools do teach a lot of useful skills; if you're selling machines to farmers, your clients probably know more about mech.e than even most of you software engineers.

"They aren't going to allow your company much margin if they can do even part of it themselves." Interesting observation.

It reminds me of the myriad of products and services targeting bootstrapped/self-funded entrepreneurs, who also tend to be resourceful by nature.

Or programming tool companies selling to programmers who notoriously will question why your tools aren't open sourced?

This is true for a large fraction of the programming world, but not all of it. As just two examples I happen to know:

  1) graphics / games / vfx
  2) energy / mining

It is the norm in these markets to pay for industry leading software tools, and I know multiple companies making profit-per-employee in ballpark FAANG range.

Cool to see that the same open source dynamics that make it possible for three engineers to ship a great web app in 3 months (Linux, Node, React, etc) also have made it much easier for people like your brother to use off the shelf tooling like Arduino to solve their own problems.

Do you mean to tell me that such a small operation just happened to have lying around some old lidar systems?

Or does the "steer" in "auto-steer" refer to a bovine?

You certainly don't need lidar to do auto-steering on a farm that you own yourself. You can get decent straight-line results using a PID controller on a compass alone, and tossing in a GPS module would make the whole thing even more accurate and robust. As as the OP said, there's already a bunch of open-source stuff out there to help make that happen.

https://www.farmprogress.com/affordable-auto-steer

You program your desired path into the system and it uses GPS to follow the path, using a device that turns the steering wheel as necessary.

The farmer is still required to avoid unexpected obstacles, usually by stopping and moving the obstacle.

Farmers have been using GPS since the 1980s, long before the rest of the general public.

It's doubtful that advanced computer vision is required to steer a tractor around a field. Adding it might improve yield somewhat, but consider the law of diminishing returns.

If you assume there isn't anything in the field for the tractor to run over, you can just use GPS.

Maybe.

Many people would be amazed by what I have lying around in my basement. However, the LIDAR is gone: I only needed for a single project and I shipped it to the client.

That was a pretty dumb farm joke. But it got funnier when so many techies got distracted by the lidar reference.

While you are making convincing case for that particular farm, let's take it into the next decade or two:

The difference between a U graduate and a non-U software developer is in the experience (and mindset) of fixing a problem vs scaling the solution. I.e., fixing the meta-problem.

A scalable solution is the one that becomes permanent, what moves the needle of the market, and what gets written up in history books.

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