Agricultural Project Feasibility: Balesledge

Projects General Guidance
1

My father has a piece of equipment for arranging straw bales into packs of ten from the back of a square baler.

Here is a link to a smiler machine

The machine uses hydraulic power from the tractor to move the bales back and forth. The hydraulics are controlled by electronic valves which change the flow or oil in a hydraulic ram. See the vid for more detail.

The original system uses mosfets to power or depower the valves, and magnetic sensors to determine the postion of the hydraulic ram. The arduino can handle both of these and there should be enough input/outputs (3 switches and 3 valves)

What I would like to know is, is it possible to have make a program to replicate what you see in the video.

Roughly what is happening is,

  1. The first bale rolls into the sorting area and triggers a switch.
  2. The program then moves the ram to the Left until it triggers another switch on the far Left to let the system know it has moved far enough.
  3. The next bale to arrive is pushed right, until it triggers the right switch.
  4. This keeps on happening in a similer fashion, moving left and right until there are five bales loaded in the sorting area. The fith bale triggers a mechanical switch which mechanically lets the five bales pass into the holding bay.
  5. The process begins again with another five.
  6. Once there are a total of ten bales on the machine, they are all ejected out of the back of the machine as a pack and the whole process starts again.

Does this sound possible, and does anyone know of any smiler programs I may be able to study.

Many thanks

Gavin

2

Sounds plausible enough. You'll likely need some addtional transistors to switch the mosfets for you - they're unlikely to be 5V. A bit of optoisolation wouldn't be a bad idea either. I've never seen such a device before, let alone seen any code for it, but with relatively little I/O, it doesn't sound like a complex piece of code.