HN

Comments (84)

• fitsumbelay
  I read a post sometime in the last 6 months about the hot business in Saskatchewan or Manitoba selling older, completely unconnected John Deere tractors because farmers found the subscription based service for connected ones to be expensive and unhelpful. Basically a net loss. This wired post seems to be payola I mean a direct rebuttal to that post as well as the behavioral wave because it's probably impacting bottom lines
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  JohnFen
  > The agricultural machine manufacturer has a subscription service that lets owners repair their own equipment. Why is barely anybody using it?Because it doesn't address the actual problem.
• nilamo
  Requiring a subscription violates the right to repair. Even for backwater places where the right to repair isn't enshrined in law (like the usa), people still know what the right to repair is, and often refuse to use a paid service what what ought to have been included in the base price.
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  AngryData
  $200 per machine per year. You use to just buy the manual and you had it forever. Farms sit on 1-2% profit margins on average but with a 30% swing in potential yield. They don't like subscription services because their yearly income is unreliable at best and they don't have any margin to waste on bs they might not use.
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  Aboutplants
  A subscription for the right to repair your own machine seems completely insane to me. How is this a thing that is allowed?
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  AShyFig
  I've always been a bit confused about the right to repair debate, especially as it concerns John Deere equipment. I don't own any "new" John Deere products, but I do have a few pieces circa ~2010. Perhaps my experience is out of date.Here's how it's always worked for me:1. A code comes up on the computer.2. A. The problem is self evident. Or;2. B. I search online and find the problem. Or;2. C. I search online and find the diagnostics manual, which I use to find the problem. Then I have diagnostics manual pdf forever, and can use this in the future.3. A. I search online and find the parts diagram. Or;3. B. I search my dealers website and find the parts diagram.4. I order the part.5. I install the part.Has something changed with newer equipment that prevents farmers from doing this?
• alpaca128
  The term "Self-Repair Service" already sounds so wrong.
• pedrorissato
  Thank you John Deere... I just miss the "sponsored" next to the article title.
• fwlr
  A more accurate title would be “Farmers Aren’t Bought”, as in “bought by John Deere”, like this author is.
• anon
  undefined
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  27183
  Why would you pay extra for some website the company could just take away from you on a whim? I have the bound paper repair manuals for my 1998 Dodge truck, my 1995 Toyota, and my 2002 Kubota tractor. Nobody can arbitrarily take those away. Why can't companies these days just print a shop manual and be done with it?
• calmbonsai
  WJW, what a blatant John Deere PR piece.Even by modern WIRED's low standards of journalism, Boone Ashworth has managed to be subterranean.
• Simulacra
  This article seems a little condescending. They are neither a mechanic nor a farmer, as they say, and from there it just sort of goes off the rails.
• 0utcast
  You shouldn't need to subscribe to a monthly or yearly payment to fucken repair shit.
• mindslight
  > I’m not a mechanic or a farmerSo the author is looking at one third of the problem (from the perspective of an IT worker), in a comfortable stage-managed experience put on by Deere themselves. A sensor with a disconnected cable - a five minute visual inspection would have also diagnosed the problem!I'm quite comfortable with computers. And yet when working on my own vehicles, anything that mentions "use the manufacturer software" is avoided unless it's impossible not to. For example my experience using Honda HDS:1. Spend hours installing Windows in a VM, HDS software from dodgy forums (to avoid the even dodgier "cloud" offering), running an ethernet cable 75 feet outside to where I was working - when my goal was to have my hands dirty fixing the car.2. Massively slow scan times. We're talking 20 minutes sitting there initializing its understanding of the bus by probing every device every time the software starts up. The software starts up a lot because every time it hits some unexpected condition it needs to be restarted. Every time you choose a different option to check something about another subsystem, the software needs to be restarted. Every time you need to check if you've made a permanent or temporary change, it needs to be restarted. Every time you actually get your hands dirty and make some change on the car, it needs to be restarted. And so on. Companies view these tools as pure cost centers, making it so embedded developers DGAF about any kind of robustness or polish.3. No actual description of what can be set, or theories of operation of any hardware device. The best you get is references from procedures in service manuals designed to be blindly followed, and the corresponding button in the software that runs some black box procedure.4. Along with that, the chance of touching a lot of things you don't really want to be touching! HDS made me reenter the VIN number every time it started up (which remember, is often), and I think this was actually writing the VIN number somewhere! I entered it wrong once and it appeared that I had actually changed something.Now obviously Deere is not Honda, but I don't see a reason to expect this would be any better. And of course this is not even touching:> Prices start at an annual cost of $195 per individual machineAll this overhead adds up when you're working on one or two vehicles in a personal-bespoke capacity. I'm never going to reach for that software again unless I absolutely have to, even though I know in theory it can tell me a lot in one central place. I'd rather simply model a vehicle's computers as black boxes. I'm sure if you're a Honda tech you develop a model of how the software works, what steps of the procedures to batch and when to pause and check things over, etc. But from an individual perspective where I've got one car to fix rather than one every day? It's utter trash.Adding digital control networks to vehicles increases their inherent complexity. This is unavoidable, similar to adding any new system (eg ABS, 4WD, emissions controls themselves, etc). I think mechanics could respect that, if it weren't bundled with a whole bunch of unnecessary/accidental complexity including top-down surveillance/control. Knowing a thing or two about technology and engineering, what would I actually expect?1. PDF documentation with thorough bus diagrams. For every node on the bus, documentation from its manufacturer - its theory of operation, the settings it has, the messages it reads from and reports to the bus, additional message/register definitions for what can be read by diagnostic tools. Everything that you'd get if these were DIP switches and LEDs rather than CAN messages.2. Machine-readable descriptions of CAN PDUs published by the manufacturer themselves. All the message/register/etc definitions documented in the above files, in a well-defined format ready for use by third party tooling.3. Third party libre software with the usual `make && make install` install path (ie easily incorporated into every operating environment) that uses those definitions to display bus messages in symbolic form, as well as craft new messages to tickle device functionality.I think that about covers it - there isn't actually much here, it just needs to be documented! I know interacting with digital vehicle networks would still be frustrating for many, but people would eventually get over it and even embrace it - it should be more convenient to have the computers display what they're reading rather than having to work around them. Checking the computers first would become standard procedure if the tooling weren't so infuriating.(For more context my own tractor is a Kubota with HP under the Tier IV threshold. I earnestly wish it did have a DPF - less shit to breathe in and less black crap coating my loader. But not at the cost of dealing with the current "state of the art" computer controls! I've also heard horror stories about long term Deere parts availability)
• cyanydeez
  this, but for your entire business, brought to you by Anthropic and OpenAI.