An Electric Vehicle Conversion With A Difference

October 30, 2024 by Jenny List 25 Comments

For a first try at an electric vehicle conversion we’re guessing that most would pick a small city car as a base vehicle, or perhaps a Kei van. Not [LiamTronix], who instead chose to do it with an old Ferguson tractor. It might not be the most promising of EV platforms, but as you can see in the video below, it results in a surprisingly practical agricultural vehicle.

A 1950s or 1960s tractor like the Ferguson usually has its engine as a structural member with the bellhousing taking the full strength of the machine and the front axle attached to the front of the block. Thus after he’s extracted the machine from its barn we see him parting engine and gearbox with plenty of support, as it’s a surprisingly hazardous process. These conversions rely upon making a precise plate to mount the motor perfectly in line with the input shaft. We see this process, plus that of making the splined coupler using the center of the old clutch plate. It’s been a while since we last did a clutch alignment, and seeing him using a 3D printed alignment tool we wish we’d had our printer back then.

The motor is surprisingly a DC unit, which he first tests with a 12 V car battery. We see the building of a hefty steel frame to take the place of the engine block in the structure, and then a battery pack that’s beautifully built. The final tractor at the end of the video still has a few additions before it’s finished, but it’s a usable machine we wouldn’t be ashamed to have for small round-the-farm tasks.

Surprisingly there haven’t been as many electric tractors on these pages as you’d expect, though we’ve seen some commercial ones.

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Fixing A Tractor Dashboard From Over 10,000 Miles Away

February 3, 2024 by Lewin Day 6 Comments

[BuyItFixIt] is well known as a dab hand at, well, fixing things… and presumably buying them, too. Recently, they received an email calling for help of the former kind. One of their Australian viewers owned the same model of tractor, but with a dead digital dash. Thankfully, help was at hand!

The problem turned out to be due to a dead EEPROM on the Australian tractor. In contrast, [BuyItFixIt] had a perfectly working dashboard on their tractor. Thus, they set about disassembling the dash and dumping the EEPROM to try and sort the stricken farm implement. This posed some risk of ending up with two dead dashboards, necessitating a careful hand. In any case, the Case tractor had a fairly simple dash with a majority of through-hole components, making it fairly easy to work with. The Microchip 93LC46B chip was in a DIP package, and was removed with the aid of some low-melting point solder in short order. The contents of the EEPROM were then dumped to a file using a XGecu T48 programmer.

With the file sent off via email, the Australian tractor owner flashed a fresh EEPROM and reinstalled it in their cluster. They were greeted with success, with the only complication being that the hours reading on the cluster had to be corrected to match the previous reading on their machine.

It’s a fairly simple story of fixing an embedded system, but it’s an educational one. It also comes with a deeper dive into how the CASE dashboard works. Just about anyone with basic electronic skills could pull this off and save an entire tractor in the process. It’s great to see these jobs documented so that we can all learn useful basic skills like these. Video after the break.

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Will Electric Tractors Farm Your Food?

May 30, 2023 by Jenny List 119 Comments

There are two professions used to driving single-seaters with hundreds of horsepower, one of which is very exclusive and the other of which can be found anywhere the ground is fertile enough to support agriculture. Formula One drivers operate fragile machines pushed to the edges of their performance envelope, while the tractor at the hands of a farmer is designed to reliably perform huge tasks on dodgy ground in all weathers. Today’s tractor is invariably a large machine powered by a diesel engine, and it’s the equal of all tasks on a modern farm. Against that backdrop then it’s interesting to read the Smithsonian magazine’s look at the emerging world of electric tractors. Will they replace diesel as the source of traction in the fields?

The two firms they focus on first are Monarch Tractor, and Solectrac. Both manufacturers offer small machines of the type we’d be inclined to describe as an orchard tractor, and Monarch are offering an autonomous option as part of their package. They also feature Farm-ng, whose machine called amusingly the Amiga, is a much smaller affair which we are guessing would be super-useful on a very intensive operation such as market gardening. We’re especially pleased to see that the emerging small electric tractor industry is embracing right to repair, something the traditional manufacturers are famous for ignoring.

It’s obvious that none of these machines are going to revolutionize the world of large high-power tractors any time soon, as they are too small for the job and can’t offer the 24/7 operation required at busy times on a farm. But it’s obvious they would be very useful on a small farm, and in particular for those tractor applications where the machine is a platform which goes from place to place to aid static work, they could be better than their diesel equivalents.

It’s odd that over the years we’ve not covered any electric tractors before. Perhaps that is, until you search instead for agricultural robots.

You Can Now Fix Your Deere

January 9, 2023 by Jenny List 29 Comments

Over the last few years we have brought you many stories about John Deere tractors, and how their repair has been locked down such that only manufacturer-authorised technicians can work on them. They’ve become a poster child in the battle for the right to repair, a symbol of the worst practices. Finally now we can bring you some good news of sorts, as the agricultural giant has signed a memorandum of understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation to ensure that their products will henceforth be repairable by people without Deere approval.

We can’t imagine that Deere will have taken this step willingly, and while we’d like to imagine that consumer protests in favour of right-to-repair have hit their mark, we’re guessing that it’s more of an economic pressure at work alongside the threat of legislation outside their native America. If farmers getting caught out waiting for a Deere van to arrive while their crop withers in the field wasn’t enough, when the price of a second-hand tractor without the DRM outstrips that of a newer one with it, eventually the sales of new tractors will also suffer.

So this is good news, and we’re guessing that other agricultural manufacturers doing the same DMCA practices will now follow suit. But it’s not a complete victory. The problem starts not with the DMCA restriction itself, but with the extension of the machine’s computer system into every part, including those many parts which simply don’t need it. It’s not a complete victory if anyone can now use the software to register a new hydraulic valve with the system; instead that hydraulic valve should not have to be authorised in the first place. It’s this creeping unnecessary complexity which is the true enemy of right-to-repair, and we shouldn’t forget that.

Header image: Dwight Sipler, CC BY 2.0.

Hyundai To Lead US Market For Hydrogen Fuel Cell Trucks

December 13, 2022 by Lewin Day 96 Comments

Hydrogen has long been touted as a potential fuel of the future. While it’s failed to catch on in cars as batteries have taken a strong lead, it still holds great promise for larger vehicles like trucks.

Hyundai have been working diligently in this space over the last few years, with its Xcient line of fuel-cell powered trucks. It’s set to dominate the world of hydrogen trucking in the US as it brings a fleet of vehicles to California next year.

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Dylan showing off his giant tractor video game controller

Real Tractor Moonlights As Farming Simulator Controller

October 28, 2022 by Drew Littrell 9 Comments

Around October, amid all the pumpkin spiced food and beverages, folks make their yearly pilgrimage to a local farm. They load themselves onto hay-filled tractor trailers and ride out in search of the perfect pumpkin to put on the front porch, and let it slowly decompose. The “closest” a video game has come to replicating this seasonal event is the annual Farming Simulator series. One modder, [Dylan], decided to add an extra level of authenticity to the Farming Simulator experience by controlling the game with an actual tractor.

The opportunity for the project presented itself thanks to a local Kiwi farmer (Kiwi as in New Zealand, not the fruit) who provided [Dylan] with access to a Case IH 310 Magnum CVT tractor. [Dylan] built a custom USB controller that mirrored the actual layout of the tractor’s control pad. Tilt sensors were wrapped around the tractor’s steering wheel and throttle to provide analog input for steering and speed control. After a number of hours tweaking the setup on site, [Dylan] live-streamed his Farming Simulator PC play session (video below) with the tractor itself left off for obvious reasons. Without tractor motor engaged there was no power steering, so he deserves a bit of extra credit for making it through multiple hours.

This certainly isn’t the first ridiculous controller project [Dylan] has taken on. He’s created a trombone controller to just to play Trombone Champ, a Nerf bow controller for Overwatch, and he even played through Hades using a literal pomegranate. You can watch more of [Dylan’s] custom controller projects on his Rudeism Twitch channel.

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Kotonki: Agricultural Vehicle Built For Customization

July 1, 2022 by Danie Conradie 23 Comments

Agriculture on any scale involves many tasks that require lifting, hauling, pushing, and pulling. On many modern farms, these tasks are often done using an array of specialized (and expensive) equipment. This puts many small-scale farmers, especially those in developing countries, under significant financial pressure. These challenges led a South African engineering firm to develop the Kotonki, a low-cost hydraulically powered utility vehicle that can be customized for a wide variety of use cases. Video after the break.

The name Kotonki is derived from the Setswana phrase for a donkey kart. It is in essence a self-propelled hydraulic power pack, capable of hauling 1 ton of anything that can fit on its load bed. It comes in front-wheel drive or four-wheel drive versions, with each wheel individually driven by a hydraulic motor. The simple welded steel frame articulates around a double pivot, which allows it to keep all 4 wheels on the ground over any terrain. At a max speed of 10 km/h it won’t win any races, but neither would most other agricultural vehicles. The Kotonki is built mostly using off-the-shelf components and is powered by a common 12HP Honda engine. In the world of DRM agricultural equipment, this makes for simple repairs, low running costs, and easy customization for the task at hand. This can include mounting log splitters, water pumps, lifting beds, or anything else that can be driven by its hydraulic and rotary PTOs (Power Take-Off).

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