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Farmers Struggling With High-Tech Farm Equipment
An anonymous reader writes: Farming is a difficult profession. One of the constants throughout the generations is that if you're working out in the field all day, machinery eventually breaks down. Farmers tend to deal with this harsh reality by becoming handy at basic repair — but that strategy is starting to fail in the digital age. Kyle Wiens, founder of iFixit, writes about the new difficulties in repairing your broken tractors and other equipment. Not only do you often need experience in computer software, but proprietary technology actively blocks you from making repairs.
"Dave asked me if there was some way to bypass a bum sensor while waiting for the repairman to show up. But fixing Dave's sensor problem required fiddling around in the tractor's highly proprietary computer system—the tractor's engine control unit (tECU): the brains behind the agricultural beast. One hour later, I hopped back out of the cab of the tractor. Defeated. I was unable to breach the wall of proprietary defenses that protected the tECU like a fortress. I couldn't even connect to the computer. Because John Deere says I can't." Wiens also tells us about Farm Hack, a community that has sprung up to build a library of open source tools and knowledge for dealing with high-tech modification and repair in agriculture.
"Dave asked me if there was some way to bypass a bum sensor while waiting for the repairman to show up. But fixing Dave's sensor problem required fiddling around in the tractor's highly proprietary computer system—the tractor's engine control unit (tECU): the brains behind the agricultural beast. One hour later, I hopped back out of the cab of the tractor. Defeated. I was unable to breach the wall of proprietary defenses that protected the tECU like a fortress. I couldn't even connect to the computer. Because John Deere says I can't." Wiens also tells us about Farm Hack, a community that has sprung up to build a library of open source tools and knowledge for dealing with high-tech modification and repair in agriculture.
This is likely one of those cases where the manufacturer is not to blame, instead it is likely federal regulations that require these systems to be locked down and only adjusted by authorized personel, I know this is the case with many new industrial engines where emissions compliance requires that field technicians no longer be able to adjust certain parameters, instead all these settings are locked down at the factory.
... if the farm equipment ran iOS. You'd just have to submit a bug report, and it would be fixed in the next update!
Oh, wait... That would be when iFarm 12.4 gets released.... and that's not scheduled until the iPlow 9S is announced...
Assuming he means a sensor to detect whether the driver is sat and the seat, surely a heavy enough bag ought to do the job?!?
Just my $0.03 (At current exchange rates, my £0.02 is worth more than your $0.02)
If the demand is really there, then go fill it.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
When features and ease of use are not the primary selling points, the detriments of closed source come to light.
As a current IT guy who grew up on a large farm in the middle of nowhere, I can confirm that this is true. I've seen the dramatic changes and advances that technology has brought to the agricultural world, and almost universally it has been implemented such that you don't really own what you really own. Proprietary software, interfaces, programs, hardware -- you name it. And...it's not just tractors, combines, or other mechanical items -- it includes software/hardware to automate feeding lots, climate controls, GPS integration, etc. There's little to no open source, open specifications, API availability, or comprehensible documentation available. It's a clusterfscking nightmare, and requires you to take anything that breaks or malfunctions to a certified dealer to have them (and only them) work on it for whatever they deem the price to be that day.
Now there are some really amazing advancements that have come along in agriculture over the past 20 - 30 years, but in many ways technology is turning the clock back on American agriculture and making it into the modern indentured servant model, especially when you add in all the BS that Monsanto has brought/caused in the agriculture world. I feel bad for my family as well as other farmers today.
Just wait for oil changes to come with DRM so you need to go to the dealer and pay a lot more then jiffy lube.
Most 'farms' in america are part of multinational food corporations like Cargill and ADM. They have motor pools to repair fleets of farm equipment like tractors and harvesters. firmware updates and engine maintenance are often performed by representatives of the companies that manufacture the equipment. IT and information systems departments handle things like GPS and computer software and hardware related to the harvest. small, agrarian farming is almost obsolete in America unless you look into how poulty and pork are raised. In these cases its small contract farmers working for larger entities like Hormell. Even these small farmers though are forced into the disposable economy of modernization that takes them out of the direct path of machines they can work on.
Growing up on a farm in Ohio I remember having to weld equipment back together. I remember cleaning carbureators, hammering out feeders, and changing fluids. It was not fun, and it often meant drastic inefficiencies like having to leave hay out too long or work two days straight trying to get things in order after a break. In a lot of ways modern equipment is more resillient and not as prone to problems. these engine computers save a ton of fuel and effort. coupling, power takeoff, gears, speed, you name it and its probably in the hands of the computer. If i had to do it all over, I'd miss my old ford tractor but i wouldn't miss how it sputtered in cold weather.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Not when I can make more locking out users and forcing them to pay me every time they need to flip a switch or reset something.
The solution to any problem is more immigration.
Seastead this.
If the demand is really there, then go fill it.
I agree in principle, but good luck playing patent ball with the big ag companies of John Deere, Case IH, and others. Their legal departments will sue the hell out of your company over bogus patent-troll worthy, awesomely obvious & trivial patents before it ever gets off the ground.
If the demand is really there, then go fill it.
They would go broke. The reason all of the sensors are there is because when they didn't have sensors, and some farmer misused they tool and got hurt, they sued the manufacturer and won lots of money. So now there are sensors to make sure you have a bum in the seat, that you don't back up with blades engaged, etc., etc. Nothing is easy to maintain anymore because society no longer wants individuals to take responsibility for their own poor judgment.
There is a difference between what a manufacturer should be responsible for and what an owner should be responsible for. For example: Engine throws a rod, causing shrapnel to injure operator. Manufacturer is responsible. Another example: Equipment allows operator to get off and stroll around in front of equipment and operator gets run over. Operator is responsible. Unfortunately, when operators misuse equipment through poor judgment, the courts side with the operator, so the manufacturer is forced to remove functionality from all users because one user is unable to exercise the commons sense required to operate the machinery.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Not when I can make more locking out users and forcing them to pay me every time they need to flip a switch or reset something.
Not if your customers have an alternative.
Welcome to the world of government mandated emission standards. It takes so much electronics and computer control to make a tractor's diesel engine run as clean as the government demands that it's unfixable by the layman, and if they open it up to adjustment by the layman, guess who will be found at fault? The manufacturer.
Additionally, the manufacturer doesn't want the layman fiddling with the settings, as what happens is the layman will turn up the power, which then causes warrentee claims. It's all the same as the automotive industry. Nothing new here. Ask duramax, powerstroke, and cummins owners about it.
Does farm equipment need these "protected computers" anyway?
Just a license to print money for the manufacturer...
The brand that doesn't lock farmers out will get more business, presuming that there is such a brand, and it makes decent equipment.
Otherwise used equipment will start commanding a better price. Plus new business will emerge in buying too-broken-to-repair farm equipment, and managing to rebuild it with better facilities and spare parts.
One of my more-fun tasks on the farm was going into the weeds to get three dead green-choppers and scabbing the parts to make one that worked.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I lived on a farm growing up, and everyone I knew did 100% of their farm equipment repairs themselves. I can just picture how pissed these guys are when they can't fix something themselves lol. I wonder if there is a huge price increase on used 1980's-1990's tractors.
I've seen this on heavy equiptment as well as other things. Usually, dusconecting the sendor altogether gets around the problem but sometimes it can create other issues. For instance, a coolant level sensor will shut the engine off if it reports both to much or to little coolant but disconecting it altogether will just throw a check engine light. An intake manifold pressure sensor can shut the enginr off too. Disconecting it will derate the power, stop the turbo from working and pretty much stop you from doing much of snything other than driving out of the field. A PTO sensor can do similat things but also cause impliments to not function corectly i had a planter that wouldn't allow the electronics to operatr the row size because it couldn't tell the PTO was on. It also derated the power of the engine.
But its worse than that. Each injector has a programable ID and a profile that needs loaded into the ECM if replaced or rven swapped to another cylinder on some of the engines (cat ) and you need a special program with factory passwords. This is big money either way you go. Either a service call with a technician or about 10 grand for a program and dongle and a subscription to a website that will generate a password bases on engine identifyers that change.
If the demand is really there, then go fill it.
Meet http://opensourceecology.org/
Only outlaws will have fixed machines....I'll just leave this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The above comment to this is on regulation.
Regulation protects the largest corporations more than it ever will protect your safety.
Farmers are historically bigoted on their equiptment. Its a matter of differences and dificulty in changing impliments. They won't just switch out because of the amount of relearning, differences in operationing, and costs of changing or replacing their attachments.
Mega commercial farms may be different. But the farmer with less than 1000 acres will trend this way. One of my neighbors still mows and rakes hay with a tractor from 1968 because of this. He uses a different tractor to bail becaise the bailer broke and he found one for his planter tractor (mid 90's) at a better price that was faster than fixing the older one.
Open source software which has not been tested by a legally responsible entity does not belong embedded systems which control large amounts of mechanical or electrical energy. Every piece of machinery is different. There are safety regulations, requirements to deal with electromagnetic interference, and failure mode analyses and effects for which the software is a critical component.
Put another way, do you want to get in elevator for which the manufacturer assumes no risk or liability? Or an airplane?
I still can replace the brakepads and discs. Change the oil and things like that. But that's about it. Currently I have a problem with the alarm going at random moments if I lock it. And it is impossible to do a proper debugging. I finally found a unofficial source to get the repair manual so I can look at it but I will have by trial and error, bypassing one censor at the time.
When all the electronics starts to break down I fear it will be expensive in man hours.
My 1948 Ford 8n tractor is still running like new. The design is ingeniously simple and meant to be repaired or rebuilt as needed by almost anyone.
As much as I love technology, I sometimes think it will be our Achilles heel.
Maybe the Department of Agriculture could require that all software used in farm equipment be completely GPLed
Slashdot was telling me just a couple months ago that "farming has been stuck in a bit of a rut" and "farming has been using techniques that have been handed down from centuries ago". Since Slashdot is never wrong, clearly farmers don't use high-tech equipment. So how can they be struggling to repair it?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I spent nearly 15 years in IT before returning to the family farm to work with my brothers. We farm several thousand acres of irrigated land with some large, expensive machines, so I have some experience in this. This article really hits home for me. Forgive some of the jargon, but this is slashdot; you can deal with it.
Coming from the open source world, computer technology in farming, both in the machines themselves, and the software farmers use, is like stepping back in time 20 years or more. Farm software is a niche market, and companies are pretty jealous of their profits. So mapping software is very expensive and interoperability is a bit difficult. Right now I can pull maps off my machines (Case, John Deere), but they each use different native formats so if I want to do any work in QGIS I have to use the company's individual software (which ironically enough is DRMd even though it comes for free with the machine) to export the data in SHAPE format. Software packages like the SMS mapper can read some manufacturers' data files directly because they licensed the formats. But there's very little info out there on hacking these formats and very few open source hackers know enough about farming and these systems to bring expertise to bear.
Even worse, all the companies are talking about cloud-based mapping solutions, but that's even more proprietary and closed.
Companies talk about "open standards" but what they really mean is they export SHAPE files from a computer program. It's really frustrating, but with interest in UAVs, perhaps people will finally crack this barrier.
As to the machines themselves, there are a number of issues. One is government regulations. Adjusting the timing as the farmer in the article wanted to do is extremely illegal and can get you a huge fine from the EPA if you are caught, which you will be. Because unlike in the automotive world, there aren't a any third-party repair shops with access to the parts, let alone diagnostic equipment. Apparently the EPA requires the manufacturer to report any deviations from the the approved program, and they levy fines. Sounds orwellian, but the EPA doesn't mess around when it comes to pollution regs (and I'm okay with that in theory). Suppose the manufacturers want to cover themselves.
Someone asked why a company can't spring up to develop hackable machines? There are efforts to this effect.
http://opensourceecology.org/
But for larger scale farming, it's harder. In the case of engines, the EPA would simply never allow them to market if the parameters that cause an engine to meet EPA regs are allowed to be changed. Regulatory capture has made modern diesels so expensive to develop now, including licensing patented pollution control technologies like the urea injection systems, that it's cheaper for companies to buy an existing engine than to develop their own. So even if I started a hackable tractor company I'd still need to use an engine with an extremely proprietary ECU, and would have to license canbus info to simply connect a transmission to the engine.
The other part of machines that is jealously guarded is the main canbus that links everything on the tractor. We're talking engine control, transmission control, hydraulic remotes, cab systems, and most importantly, the GPS receiver, guidance computer, and steering valve. The commands that flow on this bus are not yet encrypted (they will be soon, starting in cars I predict), but they are highly proprietary and protected by NDAs. You'd think that with a modern tractor I could take anyone's GPS receiver, mate it with anyone's guidance computer, and control any tractor's steering. Well it's not like that. On John Deere, for example, if I want to use anything other than GreenStar for GPS and guidance (a $10-$20k touch by the way, plus yearly fees for RTK), I have to physically replace the steering valve system with one that the 3rd party system is compatible with. There was a company that rev
Soldiers, park rangers... anyone that works in the/a field.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Mega commercial farms have cozier relationships with manufacturers and are both less likely to see this stuff as a problem and more likely to have dedicated (internal or vendor supplied) people working with them. And since the big farms make up the bulk of the market, the smaller ones and their problems are not going to have much impact on what types of devices get built.
Really!! now this is just plain stupid. and now part of planned obsolesce ... Time to make open source tractors
Bullet-proof and idiot-proof. Not mentioning granted basic repair abilities, unlike John Deere's "highly-proprietary-whatever."
There are some places where they just don't belong. The regulations everybody complains about are industry written to protect their business from interlopers, so don't go blaming the politicians you've reelected for the fifth time.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Unfortunately, when operators misuse equipment through poor judgment, the courts side with the operator, so the manufacturer is forced to remove functionality from all users because one user is unable to exercise the commons sense required to operate the machinery.
Instead of removing features.... why don't we require that operators receive proper training?
So they have to sign off and pass a test on among other things a safety course. And the manufacturer can maintain the documentation that the operator knows specific safety requirements.
Phase II is issue all successful trainees an "operator card" and equip all farm vehicles with an "operator card slot" and a biometric sensor.
To start the machine, you have to have the right SmartCard signed by the manufacturer containing your credentials and fingerprints, and the biometric sensor has to scan you and verify it matches the ID on the card.
Then if you stand up or leave the seat, you will have to reauthenticate.
So, while I normally agree with the idea that there's just a wee bit too-little personal responsibility today, I have to take exception to
Nothing is easy to maintain anymore because society no longer wants individuals to take responsibility for their own poor judgment.
Heavy machinery that is hard to misuse is a GOOD THING. Yes, there are a lot of idiots out there who make poor choices and it's hard to sympathize with the dummy who put a brick on the gas and get out of the cab, or whatever, but it also protects people against that One Stupid Thing.
You know you've done it. That One Stupid Thing that you would NEVER have done, should NEVER have done, and after you do it, assuming you survive, you can't believe you were STUPID enough to do.
We've all had that moment. Every one of us. If you say you never had a bad moment, NEVER done something that, in hindsight, was incredibly dangerous and stupid, you're a damn liar, and probably do it a lot more than you realize since you're lying to yourself as well.
Whether it was due to fatigue because something kept waking you up at night, or being sicker than you realized, or being pissed off at something that JUST happened, we've ALL had our "Holy CRAP, what the hell did I just do?!" moment, and if we're very lucky it, doesn't hurt, maim, or kill us.
I'm not saying I'm in favor of those damn lawsuits, just that if the protections are in place due to fear of being sued by an injured idiot, well, I'm glad a big company's scared then, if it makes them do the right thing. Even if 80 or 90% of those User Error events you are so irritated by are due to, well, idiots, having robust safety systems in place to keep people from hurting themselves and being maimed or killed, really is a Good Thing.
The problem isn't the tech, but the DRM. Today's sensors could make life a lot easier for the DIY repairman, by providing early warning of impending failures and detailed information about what has gone wrong. But no - once again, it serves the need of the corporation to make everything proprietary.
Linux for Tractors, anyone?
Remember way back when if you bought something you owned it and could do with it what you pleased? Good times...
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
So, do the same for farm equipment. Your John Deere harvester breaks down. You have a contract with John Deere to either get it fixed within a defined time frame or they bring out a loaner. Maintenance is no longer your problem.
Have gnu, will travel.
That was interesting justifying this particular wander into /. comments.
I've seen them at Denver Stockshow. They are full of GPS maps, computer screens, video feeds etc. Cost as much as a small plane too.
> They would go broke. The reason all of the sensors are there is because when they didn't have sensors, and some farmer misused they tool and got hurt, they sued the manufacturer
Quit being such a corporate tool.
The tort aspect of this is likely completely irrelevant since these are likely highly self reliant types used to fending for themselves for various reasons. Even in the city, this excuse "but we will get sued" is usually just bullshit. Lazy people are just trying to take advantage of the pervasive anti-lawyer propaganda.
Quit swimming in the kool-aid.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
http://opensourceecology.org/gvcs/
The Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) is a modular, DIY, low-cost, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts. We’re developing open source industrial machines that can be made at a fraction of commercial costs, and sharing our designs online for free.
The same has been true of cars and trucks for more than a decade now. People can't as easily be Saturday morning mechanics, anymore. If something is wrong with your vehicle, you bring it to a technician who can read from your diagnostics port to isolate what the problem is.
I live in rural Alberta and the market is their the number of farmers shunning the big american brands in favour of cheaper simpler Chinese tractors is growing we have 4 dealers for those Chinese tractors within 15 minutes of me and the nearest Deere dealer is almost an hour.
The only big brand i see are the exceptionally large combines and other big speciality type machines.
Those seat snesors are easy enough to fool. We used to keep a rock in the cab with us in case we needed to go to the restroom during a long haul. Throw the rock in the seat and you're free to hop up and step out of the cab to go pee while the whole thing is moving. Just be sure to hold on, 8mph doesn't sound like much, but it's plenty fast to kill you when half a million pounds of dirt and steel come rolling over you if you fall.
Gosh I miss that job. For a while there, just using the bathroom inside felt strange to me.
You're probably right, but I get annoyed on some of the safety crap. Like on my lawn tractor, the seat contacts are a little worn and if I lean forward or bounce on a rock while the blades are engaged, the mower will start to die. Similar issue with trying to start the mower. It won't start with the blades engaged (which makes sense), but the sensor is worn, and now in order to start the tractor, I have to haul back on the blade engage lever. I used to be able to get off the mower as long as the blades were not engaged, but due to the worn sensor, it now thinks they are engaged when they are not, so I can't get off the mower. Backing up is the same issue. It won't let you back up with the blades engaged, even if they are not engaged, but it thinks they are.
Quote at the bottom of the page "A memorandum is written not to inform the reader, but to protect the writer. -- Dean Acheson". How appropriate.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
because society no longer wants individuals to take responsibility for their own poor judgment.
Um... you are glossing over the minor fact that these INDIVIDUALS are the ones that file a court case in the first place. The legal system doesn't roam the country looking for injustices to fix. Society doesn't either.
The first opportunity to take responsibility for a screwup is the INDIVIDUAL who fails twice - first their mistake and second going to society to address that. If these people believed their own philosophy of independence, rugged individualism and responsibility, they would just silently deal with the consequences of their errors and not sue in the first place.
You simulate it. Most sensors in modern ECU's are "dumb" and just produce a voltage, resistance or ampere. You have to simulate a acceptable value to the ECU to get it to function even without the sensor. (I have done this on two occasions, Arduino is your friend!)
> They would go broke. The reason all of the sensors are there is because when they didn't have sensors, and some farmer misused they tool and got hurt, they sued the manufacturer
Quit being such a corporate tool.
The tort aspect of this is likely completely irrelevant since these are likely highly self reliant types used to fending for themselves for various reasons. Even in the city, this excuse "but we will get sued" is usually just bullshit. Lazy people are just trying to take advantage of the pervasive anti-lawyer propaganda.
Quit swimming in the kool-aid.
In these cases, the plaintiff rarely starts the case. Instead, some lawyer reads the news in the paper and jumps at the opportunity to rake in some cash, as long as they can convince the plaintiff that it's in their best interest.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
We have a winner! Mom-and-pop farms don't matter anymore. They lost. The market caters to the mega-agri-business. Whatever family farms still operate do so on the fringes, usually one bad year away from being forced to sell. For all the noises that people make about supporting local farms, they don't really (and honestly can't) give a shit in a meaningful way about who grows their food. As long as it is cheap and they only have to interact with it at the grocery store, people will be happy and content.
You eat factory food. You will always eat factory food. Unless there is some monumental sea-change (on the scale of the homestead act) this will forever-more be the case.
Well those self-reliant types can buy a tractor that they can maintain themselves, they just don't get the latest and greatest with it.
No one is requiring them to buy a new John Deere tractor, it just ends up being easier to do so.
You've been reading waaay to much fiction, or you're a "tool" of romantic idealists. The vast majority of modern farmers (I.E. those able to afford farm equipment running into six figures) are businessmen, not self reliant loners. (Among other things, that means they have insurance, and insurance companies willing to sue of their behalf.)
This is why you see older equipment on farms. First because some of the new high tech gear is too complex and most importantly it's really, really expensive. There are still farmers (granted less than 1000 acres) that are still farming with equipment made in the 40s and 50s.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Second hand experience with a friend who drives a swather (it's the thing that cuts hay) and occasionally a disc harrow (which breaks large dirt clumps into smaller dirt clumps):
It's a rare day that goes by without some improvised fix. At least once a week the machinery breaks badly enough that you can't finish the current field.
Also, this is a $150,000 machine. Also this is a 120 lb lady fixing things with duck tape, WD-40 and kicking shit until it works in the field. Right after crying about running over Bambi (fawns remain motionless and hidden as big scary farm equipment draws near).
Unfortunately, when operators misuse equipment through poor judgment, the courts side with the operator, so the manufacturer is forced to remove functionality from all users because one user is unable to exercise the commons sense required to operate the machinery.
Instead of removing features.... why don't we require that operators receive proper training?
The solution is neither black boxes nor unsafe devices.
Go ahead and have automation and sensors. Just require that manufacturers publish all the specifications and service manuals for the stuff they sell. The machine can still shut off when it detects an unsafe condition, but now the owner can decide whether they want to replace the $5 sensor themselves vs having somebody fly out and fix it for them.
I want to be able to fix my own car within reason. That doesn't mean that I don't want my car to sound an alarm when my brakes are in danger of failing and prevent my kid who doesn't know any better from starting the car (hey, dad, I noticed at the store that my tire is flat. didn't the TPMS light turn on? oh, that light on the dashboard I ignored? yeah, the one that forces me to drive out and fix your tire in the middle of a parking lot instead of right next to my garage with all my tools.).
I know for a fact that certain makes/models of aging tractors have very low or even non-existent aftermarket resale value because they are too hard/confusing to troubleshoot and ECUs/electronics/wiring parts are way too expensive. A clever mechanic/electronics person could make a lot of dough 'breaking the code' on these control systems, buying these tractors cheap, rebuilding the electronics and selling for 10's of thousands each.
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"-B.Franklin
I'd be willing to bet lots of money that farmers still have the option of buying older models with simpler, less fuel-efficient engines, less capabilities, etc.
You can have:
a) super high tech, comfortable, efficient, efficacious equipment, at the price of being a hostage to your vendor
b) old tech, uncomfortable, noisy, manually-controlled equipment that you can mess with all day long.
You get a OR b.
-Styopa
I have two uncles who are farmers- both earned agricultural degrees at Cornell and both of them were one of the first business people I knew that incorporated computers in their livelihood. They cows wore radio tags and had automated systems to control how much the cows were fed and tracked milk production in addition to a variety of other things that are a part of farming. This was in the 80's.
It is hard for me to imagine there are many successful farmers left that aren't technologically savvy.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Having some of this old technology myself, and being exposed to automotive technology on a regular basis in my professional life, I think that corporations should be required by law to freely licesne any diagnostic, control, programming, monitoring, or other software for automotive or industrial equipment to the owners of said equipment. You may have to buy (or make) a set of adapter cables, however the software to be able to diagnose, troubleshoot, and repair your own equipment should be the right of the owner and operator and not locked up by some propriatory software requiring dealer repairs, or very expensive dealer software.
Disclaimer: I sell and replace and update engine computers.
Cars manufactured before 1996 used proprietary incompatible physical connectors. They used proprietary communication techniques after that, OEM specific codes and different implementations of all of this.
The EPA mandated emissions controls and Unified the OBD2 connector and interface. A lawsuit opened it to the aftermarket. The process is proprietary, usually requires java and internet explorer 9. AMD processors are not supported by some OEMs.
Diagnosing and tracing a misfire or no start condition can still be a nightmare as often times the last branch of the diagnostic tree is An ECM replacement.
Even with the tools, the subscriptions, the software updates i still have ZERO control over the Contents of the ECM program. I could MIM Hack the software and reverse engineer it but that may even be DVD john territory and would leave me open to liability.
It would be much easier to find said sensor and create a dummy sensor or map it and reproduce its signal with a microcontroller or raspberry pi.
We got together with the mechanics organizations and got the freedom to repair act passed. Now we can not bypass emissions legally. But we do have the information for scan tools to find the defect and replace the defective part, including calibration routines as needed. We can reverse engineer replacement parts and have them legal to sell.
Farmers and independent service as well as the folks that supply parts need to band together, make some campaign contributions and get this law extended to the aftermarket. while some companies still fight it, many have learned it is good business to have a market for older machines that the OEM no longer finds sufficient profit in supplying parts.
Rod
More people means more roads, more dams and chemical-free tracts of land, and lastly, more industrial/commercial waste. This is part of the 'broken window' fallacy, that more consumption is a cure-all. Raising the GNP is easy: Slavery, or if one dislikes that idea, sweat shops. These solutions increase production, not consumption. Unfortunately, increasing consumption is a distant and very unreliable third choice. As population increases, productivity decreases. The economies of scale gained by volume and standardization are gradually lost as more and more people don't fit into a culturally defined, standard lifestyle. This is magnified when a dissimilar culture is suddenly planted inside another. With the side effect that the benefits of multiculturalism don't appear for 20 or 30 years.
Buy Russian tractors.