Sick Codes has jailbroken a John Deere and this is just the beginning. Turns out our entire food system is built on outdated, unpatched Linux and Windows CE hardware with LTE modems.
Sick Codes has jailbroken a John Deere and this is just the beginning. Turns out our entire food system is built on outdated, unpatched Linux and Windows CE hardware with LTE modems.
Should have had a choke and carburetor…instead of all in computerization.
Must be just me in wanting independent machinery…
Can’t beat a good ole Detroit Diesel.
It will always fire up with or without a battery, provided it has a cable shutoff , drag em down the road and let out the clutch .
Once a tractor is out of warranty there are independent mechanics who can diagnose and repair most tractors.
The video channel below is run by a one man repair business in Northern California and often has choice words about John Deere. He uses 3rd party software to access and diagnose the John Deere and others software/firmware which now controls every aspect of modern farm machinery.
western truck and tractor repair
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNVKQS-Jl70TYCmsEPO73QA
Speaking as someone who services his own fine Bavarian automobiles (with the help of YouTube) … everything from brakes, to tune up, to Valve cover replacement, water pump replacement … I cannot IMAGINE not being able to service and repair my HELLA expensive computer controlled Farm Equipment. That’s unconscionable. And a total money grubbing SCAM! If we had a functioning government that didn’t suckle at the teat of Wall Street … it would be illegal to block Farmers from repairing their high tech equipment.
Those “fine Bavarian automobiles” have their planned obsolescence built right in to the “check engine” light. I wouldn’t buy one of those money pits….ever.
I have a 2015 ford F-150 with a 3.5 ltr V6.
At 135.000 miles a part broke in the engine that Ford has never seen before.
$18.000 later and Ford telling me to bugger off. So I’m not a fan of fine Bavarian automobiles, but come on Ford.
All because they failed to do a harness test on the crankshaft. Why could go wrong.
If enough of them break and people like the vehicle, private enterprise like Scat Cranks will get involved and make a superior product to fix said problem if Ford refuses.
It has been going on since the days of the Model T.
I bit the bullet and replaced the whole engine. $8500 for the new engine. The rest went for install plus I was told the exhaust pipes to the two turbos were bad. I kept them and they had a slight mismatch, but a simple milling could have fix it. I hate Ford.
There s no 6uild 6ack 6etter…
They want a complete collapse…
As long as diesel is avail, I will service my D’max…m’self.
And when it runs out ..?? There’s olive oil, coconut oil, avocado oil…and French Fry Oil…..enough so that I can transform it into a relativistic projectile….for one last “delicious” run.
Everybody with common mechanical knowledge knew Ford V6 trucks – with more towing capacity than the standard V8 – was a disaster waiting to happen. Buyer beware.
Ancient history. The DME computer control of the engines essentially self-tune themselves. The only planned obsolescence is in the plastic parts everywhere in the engine. Most likely to lighten the weight of the car to meet the utterly absurd CAFE standards.
Not just the engine… I previously owned an ’89 Ford F150 4×4, purchased used. shortly after the purchase, the odometer and speedometer quit working. I discovered that the problem was a common problem… The speedometer is connected to the transfer case, and uses a couple of plastic gears to spin the cable; at about 140-160k miles, the plastic gears on that connection wear out and need to be replaced.
Unfortunately, while those two replacement gears cost about $35 if you buy them from Ford, it will cost you AT LEAST $300 labor to do the job, since they need to open the transfer case.
I quickly figured out the conversion between RPM and speed, and passed on the repair.
Those of you who like “fine Bavarian automobiles” would enjoy one episode of “Hoovie’s Garage” (“The dumbest automotive channel on yooboob”) concerning one “fine Bavarian automobile” he had. Hoovie always buys the cheapest, most clapped-out, most clapped-up car he can find, pays a series of long-suffering mechanics he knows (usually Car Wizard and Car Ninja) to fix them, and then sells them – not always for a profit; the Bavarian automobiles in particular having long since lost the reputation for reliability they once enjoyed, sometimes the repairs are wallet-crippling.
The particular car in this episode, ran like cr@p – always had. He finally took it to the Car Ninja, who specialises in these autos, and the Car Ninja said “Just a minute – I remember one of these that I fixed awhile ago; let me check something.” Modern cars pretty-well all have a crankshaft position sensor – the car in question’s crankshaft position sensor ran off a many-toothed tin wheel at the back of the engine, roughly the size of the torque converter; i.e., at least a foot in diameter. The Car Ninja removed an inspection cover on the car’s bell housing and he slowly turned the engine with a wrench while they inspected that toothed wheel, and sure enough, one of the teeth was bent.
Car Ninja straightened that tooth with a pair of pliers and the car was fixed – it purred out of there like it’d just rolled off the assembly line.
Don’t blame Wall Street. Funding for your next disruptive tech, business, service comes from Wall Street.
Let me ask you a question. If every hour or so, every business day, for years a million dollars, came into your hands, tens of millions a few times a week…for years, would you not be tempted?
Every day trillions of dollars are handled in Wall Street. Guess what. No contract. No lawyer. Done to the penny.
No industry comes close to scrupulous honesty.
This isn’t going to go well. The average farmer is not going to be able to patch or modify the firmware in their heavy equipment without creating massive safety problems.
I say this because the average embedded firmware engineer is not able to patch or modify firmware without creating massive safety problems.
So Daniel
“The average farmer is not going to be able to patch or modify the firmware in their heavy equipment without creating massive safety problems.”
Intent ?
Or design flaw?
Deere’s actions imply intent.
“
Ten ton tractor. Drop a curly bracket or a semicolon in the firmware update for the auto-steer. Ten ton tractor suddenly goes where it is not supposed to go.
Oops.
Trained professional software engineers do this ALL THE TIME. Witness the recent Rogers outage taking down half the country. Somebody dropped a curly bracket.
The only way this can be avoided is with testing. And by testing I mean more than once around the farmyard to make sure the brakes work. Farmers can’t do that testing. They’re busy. More testing is more better. Factory updates are good.
Where the right-to-repair comes in is not guys fiddling with the guts of their auto-steer or engine ECU, but in stupid things like changing the differential. JD has chipped and instrumented every major part on the machine. You can’t take the diff off a parts machine and drop it in your own unless you have a software key. You can’t get one except from the dealership, and they charge you for it even though you already own the replacement part. They can jack you up any time they like. That’s bad.
Some of it is deliberate and some of it is just because complex software systems are -complex- and factory testing is the only thing between safety and a tractor driving through your house.
Same for the farm industry, the appliance industry, the auto industry, and the HVAC industry, etc. The latter advertise “energy saving” electronically commutated motors (ECM )that “will save YOU – as the consumer – money!” The truth is that these motors are only made by a handful of manufacturers; and they’re designed to have the same horsepower ratings and construction to keep manufacturing and supply chain costs down. But the real trick is that they all use computer chips for operation and the manufacturers change the performance characteristics with software… so while it may be the same motor it can’t be used across all brands and models. Then they charge 10x more for these motors in comparison to older “inefficient” (yet highly reliable and repairman friendly) permanent split capacitor (PSC) motors. The only results are higher equipment purchase prices, higher repair costs, fewer options for the consumer to service their equipment… Oh and higher profits for manufacturers, installers and repairmen. No different than John Deere.
Reply to Daniel Ream …
You are correct …”The average farmer is not going to be able to patch or modify the firmware …”. Earlier farm equipment was 100% mechanical and often if a person had some machine shop experience , many parts could be fabricated. Once the industry transitioned to software/firmware control , modifying the firmware was impossible without access to the source code IP (Intellectual Property). No matter how the RightToRepair groups attempt to address the issue , the impenetrable wall is ownership of the IP (Intellectual Property) which currently resides with the manufacturer.
The best they can hope for is if the farmer has a tractor which is very popular , someone might reverse engineer the function of say a John Deere firmware controller (much like ATI reverse engineered the 1st IBM graphics card) , and provide an after-market module … but only if it is profitable to do so.
It’s not magic, it’s just a PLC.
Feed it the right inputs and hook up the right outputs.
Sure Stan. How many lines of code in an auto-steer module, do you think? You going to read all that?
Probably about 60k more than there should be.
You can buy a GPS add-on auto steer for about $3500.00.
Use it as a stand alone unit or use it to feed the JD steering system.
Computers and the internet will be our downfall
I have been saying it for over 20 years
computers, cell phones and all that give Tyrants more ways to be tyrannical
and we rely on something that a 15 year old can hack for our banking system, our defense etc etc
it ll be our downfall…or an important factor in it
and yes I miss my car that had a carburator.
Having grown up on a farm that still used belt drive implements, and now living on a farm that still does require coding of any kind, driving trucks and cars that specifically have no GPS or locating devices, and shunning cell phones, I get to wondering at times, why people bring all this grief upon themselves? 160 acres is not large by any measurement, but it provides a lot of food, and pays our bills, and the hard work keeps us young.
Simplify your lives, and get away from this crap. it’s only going to get worse, and more intrusive if you continue to play their games.
A quarter section. Nice!
We thought about going larger, but the increased work time and demand for larger implements changed our minds. We added more greenhouses behind the shed instead and expanded our crop diversity. We’re even trying to create a new greenhouse using geothermal to warm the ground a bit, and grow lemon trees in Manitoba. They can handle a bit of cold (-3) but not the Jan-Feb insanity, hence the warmer soil and the greenhousing. The only other problem is adding light to compensate for the short days in Nov-Feb.
I will stick with my old Case tractor until I can’t find parts for it anymore. John Deere is overrated anyway.
8 years ago I was in the market for a tractor. Did a lot of research on the various brands and companies.
I looked at JD. End up with a Kubota. 🙂 Great machine.
Am I missing the point here?
The average farmer does not want to fix or reprogram their equipment,they just want the thing to do what they bought it for.
And when a piece wears out or fails they want it repaired and back in service asap.
So when the equipment fails due to software issues.
Or parts cannot be changed without manufacturer extortion,that equipment becomes junk and the manufacturer becomes an enemy..
What the Phantom says in his fourth paragraph is the heart of this.
That mass produced mechanical parts might need “programming” before being useful is beyond belief..
Unless the intention is to extort the customer.
The differential is a perfect example..A device that is not smart,is identical to all on the same series of John Deere,yet will not swap,without backshee to JD..
Nice business plan.
If you want to be replaced by Mahindra.
I had a small JD tractor for my 2.5 acres. I was not sure that it was going to be powerful enough for what I needed it for, and after explaining to the vendor and being assured it would be fine, I suffered for the next 10 years with an underpowered tractor.
It had a plastic hood, and as you can imagine, the plastic split around the hinges. The nice bright yellow JD (plastic) seat also split. That wasn’t too hard to replace with an e-bay special.
When it came time to get a new one, I looked at the slightly more powerful JD tractors. Even more was plastic. Not just the hood, but the mudguards, the engine side panels – practically everything.
Then, driving past a local Mahindra vendor I decided to take a look, just to see what they were like. I used to have a neighbor that sold them, he insisted they were good, but it was his business, so I always assumed that he was a bit biased.
For less than the price of the JD I was looking at, they had a more powerful tractor. All steel, not a bit of plastic eexcept around the rear indicators and around the instrument pod. No software lockin, no stupid fluids to meet emission standards, more powerful bucket, more powerful power steering … guess which one I bought, and have been quite happy with?
A friend of our boys runs a cotton farm here in Oz. His brand new JD is out with a code whose meaning is unknown to JD.
And that description of what was found sounds a lot like what was found a while back by a bloke who was delving into electronic voting machines – he was NOT impressed.
I traded in my 440A John Deere skidder last year. It was really high tech: it had an electric fuel pump.
If the software uses any Linux, isn’t the whole software package available to the user at no cost / no barrier?
I’ve been in the heavy equipment industry for nearly 30 yrs. When I started, a large portion of equipment still had controls where the lever you touched was hooked to the valves, trans, engine via mechanical linkage and electronic control engines were in their infancy. I have been along for the ride as sensors and solenoids, hooked to computers, have replaced links, rods, pivots, hoses, cables… And I have struggled along with everyone else learning to diagnose and repair the complex emissions equipment forced upon the industry.
A couple observations:
Electronic controls are cheaper and easier to build, so there would be little price difference between an old school machine or electronic controled one these days.
The switch to EC has been market based, build 2 similarly sized units, add the high tech and creature comforts on one… see which one sells.
EC has usually resulted in better fuel efficiency and/or performance. Build a truck that gets 20% better MPG, see how many sell.
EC cuts down on operator abuse, computers protect the mechanical systems they control. Over the span of my career, life expectancy of engines and transmissions has doubled.
….. EC is just better.
Right to repair….
I have never denied a customer repair information. A code pops up on your screen in the cab, give me a call and I will do my best to walk you through the repair….. And that is where I see a disconnect. People either cannot, or refuse to, learn & understand simple electronic diagnostics. 1/2 the time, you don’t need any fancy computer tools, the code on the screen and a multimeter will suffice.
Next, us old school technicians are retiring, the new generations go cross eyed when you explain a mechanical engine governor or regenerative hyd circuit. If it doesn’t have a computer, it ain’t getting fixed.
And finally, is it right to repair, or right to modify? I can’t name a farmer or trucker who can resist tinkering with things. The continued popularity of the tractor/truck pull at the local fair pretty much sums up my observation. The access people are asking for, also allows the modification of engine settings for power, or tampering with emissions equipment.
I could go on but….