One reason for using FarmOS for me is keep most farm data in one place no matter what other services I use.
This involves exporting from these services, and importing it to FarmOS.
I’ve had great pleasure of reading my grandfather’s notebooks. Services come and go, and often so the data in them. It’s nice to keep most of the data in a way that I can maintain most of the history.
Export features has become an important feature when selecting what services to use.
I’m looking into various tractor GPS solutions. I definately want to export data from these.
Does anyone here know who support it, and who don’t?
I’ve used FieldBee for some years, and it’s cheap and great. But export is not very good.
Yea, its pretty cool, they seem to have everything you’d expect from a commercial product.
RTK
Section Control
Autosteer
CanBus
But it would definitely be a project to get all the bells and whistles and not just a plug and play solution. The amount of GPS work required here on my little farm would not justify a commercial GPS, but it may just suit my purposes for recording spray/slurry/FYM application with a basic antenna.
Yep. It’s great features indeed. It’s always a cost/need dilemma. One thing is making it work, another thing is support when it’s not working when you need it to…
Think it’s too much for me alone, but i’ll definately keep it on my radar.
Anyhow, we should be able to extrac our data from all services. Open source or not.
I agree, at the moment I’ve a fair bit of time for tinkering, as I only have a small part time farm operation and I’ve taken a career break from my main occupation to look after my young family. I was working in IT/Electronics related fields so a few projects helps to keep up some of my skills and hopefully add a few new ones before going back.
Yes absolutely we should always be able to control our own data. Open source projects like this help keep the closed source producers on their toes if nothing else, but I also wouldn’t be surprised to see an off the shelf product like this appear soon but still based on open source hardware/software. So worth keeping an eye on.
FieldBee does allow some data export though, is it the format that is difficult or the data that is lacking? Is it worth contacting them about adding better export features or an API?
I asked the FieldBee guys. I was a bit too hasty in my trying. There are different places to export from. When exporting from the task-list, everything sorted out right.
It’s possible to filter out what tasks you want, and export to xls. Would have to strip a few header lines, and then do some “bit-magic” and get it into FarmOS.
That’s great, saves an investment in new equipment.
I’m sure no matter what system you have the data will need to be reformatted to suit your farmOS needs, ,xls shouldn’t be the worst format to work with either, as their are excel and spreadsheet contrib nodes that should make it simpler if using Node Red. I haven’t used any yet myself so don’t have a recommendation. Do let us know how you get on.
Yep. Need a little work on the xls.
But it’s a great start knowing it’s possible.
I wil update when i have something useful, or need some help
@mstenta It could also be a nice future feature for FarmOS to provide a general GUI to let the user mach spreadsheet column and database fields for such cases. If the GPS-provider changes the export data, the user must update the template.
It would be as if FarmOS had direct import from different GPS systems.
EliteHerd provides a similiar feature for importing different slaughterdata on pigs. Works great. And the user can see the result before actually importing it.
I agree that would be awesome! I’d love to know if there are any off-the-shelf open source libraries that provide this kind of feature. We used the Drupal Feeds module in v1 for CSV imports, but it is designed more for “site administrators” than end users, and there were a lot of “gotchas”. Some variation of that (probably using the new Migrate API) is still our best option for v2 (as far as Drupal modules go) - but it’s exciting to see folks exploring non-Drupal options in CSV Importers in v2.x
Just ran across this post Fits with my FarmOS motivations as well. Your ref to FieldBee caught my eye. I also use FieldBee. It works for navigation but it’s not good for farm records. A tighter integration between FarmOS and FieldBee would be interesting. Some time ago I made this recommendation to Alexy, Dir Engr, at FieldBee. Essentially why are they investing time to dev yet another farm records management solution. They should tie their FieldBee record system to FarmOS. Everyone would be better off. Unfortunately no reply. Something to post to the FieldBee user group on Facebook maybe. See if it draws interest.
Oh… cool
Yea, FieldBee is quite ok for navigation.
I know they are planning/working on an API. Iv’e made some comment on that via their support-line.
I got the timpression that they were interested in feedback on how the API should work.
I had to send a couple mails before I got any answere, so their propably busy
Maybe we should keep them warm…
