Before I Can Fix This Tractor, We Have To Fix Copyright Law (slate.com)

Gr8Apes writes: How many people does it take to fix a tractor? When the repair involves a tractor's computer, it actually takes an army of copyright lawyers, dozens of representatives from U.S. government agencies, an official hearing, hundreds of pages of legal briefs, and nearly a year of waiting. Waiting for the Copyright Office to make a decision about whether people like me can repair, modify, or hack their own stuff. why do people need to ask permission to fix a tractor in the first place? It's required under the anti-circumvention section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Even unlocking your cellphone required an act of Congress to make it legal.

Comments

Simple fix

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't buy "Made in the USA". It applies to much more than tractors.

Re:Simple fix

[Wain13001]

The Toyota cars sold in the USA are manufactured in the USA. "Domestic" isn't always that easy to tell.

Re:Simple fix

[omnichad]

Reading yes, sending commands, no.

Not going to help.

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting as AC because I work for one of those 'tractor' companies.

why do people need to ask permission to fix a tractor in the first place?

1. The EPA makes us do this. We have to encrypt stuff so that you can't easily add a emissions defeat device. If we didn't encrypt it every redneck farmer would be ripping off their DPF and other emissions devices because they didn't understand it. (Just like they did with catalytic converters way back when)

2. Even if you had the 'source' in front of you it'd still require tens of thousands of dollars in tools chains. I would put money on the fact that the source isn't even in C. Building ECM flashfiles, in some work circles, is up there with voodoo. These aren't your grandpas ECMs there isn't a "Tractor_ECM.c" file that you can make some changes to and recompile with GCC. As far as I know there isn't an OSS compiler available for embedded PPC and certainly not one available for eTPU functionality.

If you want to modify your tractor or car to do your bidding you're better off making your own fully open ECM from scratch. This is what they look like under the hood and are engineered to live in places that a RaspPi or Arduino wouldn't live for more than a few days..

Re:Not going to help.

[Anonymous Coward]

Who exactly made the choice of tools to use in the first place?

Lots of people, here's a brief SAE technical paper on it: Caterpillar Automatic Code Generation

Why not choose non-proprietary hardware in the first place? Too simple?

As much as Slashdot hates to acknowledge it money makes things work. We pay a company to develop a compiler instead of hoping some volunteers do it for us. We pay a company to have parts of a toolchain in place so we don't have to.

Too simple? Too hard. There's no piece of open source hardware that comes close to what tractor ECMs could do a decade ago. The OSS community seems to be more interested in dev boards than actual finished products. This ECM is what drives a lot of the world of tractors. There are a dozen or so variations that have different pins populated with different IO but at its heart it's a 40(?) MHz Freescale MPC56XX chip with an eTPU to do all the fast timing.

But it exists because we paid engineers a lot of money to develop it. We paid more engineers to test it and even more engineers to write software for it all while paying outside companies for their tools to cut prototyping time. Vector CANape for CAN based calibration, Mathworks Simulink for model based control, Wind River for their diab compiler.

I would love to tear the ECM out of my VW TDI and replace it with one of our own. I could write a new controller for my car in an hour or two with our toolchain. Without the tool chain it's a PITA and I haven't bothered.

We treat our tools as tools. I don't question how or who designed my hammer when I use it to hit nails. I just care that it doesn't break and works as it is designed. The 'toolbox' I'm sitting on right now is the sum result of decades of development ahead of where open source is.

IF anyone wants to help develop a completely OSS ECM and toolchain for ECM development I have a laundry list of what is needed to catch OSS up with where industry was in 2005, but I'm not holding my breath.

Re:Not going to help.

[Anonymous Coward]

but where does one start with the list?

Start with Simulink. Model based design is everywhere. Simulink is the only gorilla in the room at this point. With what I've seen people do with Python it shouldn't be hard (technically) to make something similar. You're going to have to make sure it meets industry standards like ISO 26262.

Pick a RTOS. ChibiOS, FreeRTOS, etc

A decent CANape replacement for calibration.

Then you're going to need hardware. You just need an open source version of the Caterpillar A4. Something that takes 18-28V, is hardened against lightning strikes and random stray voltages. Can handle thousands of hours under the hood of a diesel engine. It needs to have a eTPU or FPGA made for timing diesel injection events accurately. The rusEFI project has started their own ECM and in the last year gotten the absolute basics but is nowhere close to what engineered OEM ECMs provide.

Any one of those on its own would be a grad school level project (and should be).

Re:Wonder when "open source" will hit vehicles

[Anonymous Coward]

That is a licensed feature and even though the transmission supports it, the TCM won't enable it unless the manufacturer gets $2000 for a license key. Want to use a combine attachment?

It already exists. What do you think is the difference between the 950 HP and the 975 HP engines? They're the exact same iron set it's a software 'unlock'.

Re:Make a law saying that independent repair shops

[Anonymous Coward]

So that 'independent' repair shops can pop up across the country and remove emissions controls? They'll slap a "For off road use only" or "For demo testing only" sticker on the side while it continues to pollute at pre-2010 emissions regulations levels.

So that they can unlock power levels that took money and engineering resources to develop? What incentive does the company have to continue to develop them?

Different ratings may share a common set of hardware but 'just' have different maps and tunes. The difference between 900 HP and 950 HP is probably just a couple of bits. It doesn't mean it's "free". It's hundreds of man hours tuning both settings. It's months of test cell time burning diesel fuel to get the settings just right. It's reams of paperwork for the EPA to verify that we are within emissions and stay within emissions for so many hours.

The end result may be the difference between them may just be 0xfe to 0xff but the process it took to get there may have costed $1M+. Charging for those software changes are the way we stay in business and recoup R&D costs. Now you just want us to give it away to an independent shop for free?

Re:Wonder when "open source" will hit vehicles

[cryptolemur]

Of course, theoretically, 'competition' in 'markets' should stamp this out.

That theory also talks about "informed actors". That is, consumers being able to get all the information -- a world without trade secrets...

Re:Make a law saying that independent repair shops

[ranton]

go fuck yourself

This guy actually takes the time to provide the most informative posts for the article, and this is your response? I'm not saying I agree with everything the tractor manufacturers are doing, but he has at least laid out some very interesting factors to consider.

What I do know is the massive productivity enhancements new tractors and combines give to farmers (my dad is a farmer), and new electronic systems are a main driver of that. If America still wants its dollar menus and steak meals under $20, we cannot keep using the same machinery my dad did when he started farming 50 years ago.