An ARM-based Environment for Combine Harvester Process Monitor via CAN Bus

Combine harvester is one of the most complex agricultural machinery during field operation. To obtain maximal capacity and better performance, a controller area network (CAN bus) based monitor system was constructed and tested. The prototype system consists of a series of microcontroller driven nodes to collect on board information. In each node, an embedded controller was utilized to perform the data acquisition and communication task. The developed software could accomplish multiple tasks including data acquisition, information exchange and data storage at a frequency of 1 Hz. The developed system could be further extended for fault diagnosis and control.