Development a Single Row Potato Planter for Small Holdings

Abstract

The objective of this research was to develop a single-row of automatic potato planter by modification the metering mechanism spoon size to well-matched with size and shape of slide tuber that previous cutting to overcome the high prices of import potato tuber in January period. This planter was locally fabricated to be operated by mini tractor to suit the small holdings. The modified planter performance was evaluated under three different spoon diameters of 25, 35 and 45 mm, three forward speeds of 1.6, 2.4 and 3.2 km/h and two different shapes of potato (oblong and spherical) namely, Sponta and Diamond varieties. The field results revealed that, as spoon size diameters (D) increased from 25 to 45 mm, the percent of void tubers decreased from 4.04 to 2.58% and the percent of double tubers increased from 2.83 to 8.31 %. While as the forward speed (S) increased from 1.6 to 3.2 km/h, the percent of void tubers increased from 2.57 to 3.87 % and the percent of double tubers decreased from 7.18 to 4.95 %. The proper distribution uniformity values of 91.81% for the potato planter was obtained at 25 mm spoon diameter and 3.2 km/h forward speed which gave 3.4 and 4.79 % for the percent of void and double tubers respectively. The distribution uniformity of oblong potato tubers (Sponta) was better than that of spherical potato tubers (Diamond). At the proper operating parameters, the consumed specific energy was 22.28 kWh/fed, the estimated total costs was 180.18 EGP/fed.

Potato planter test bed based on capacitive precision seed-monitoring and miss-seeding compensation system

“…In this interrupt function, the CPU reads the current time of T/C-3 and makes a backup. In addition, by subtracting the last backup time from the just obtained value, the time taken to generate the past 2000 external pulses can be obtained, and then the current sinusoidal signal frequency f out can be calculated, and then, the immediate space capacitance value can be known through Equation (7).…”

“…However, it often causes miss-seeding because of seed absence in the spoon after it has passed through the seed tank [6,7] , which will inevitably lead to congenital yield reduction. At present, the typical value of this production loss scale is 5%-8% [8] .…”

“…In particular, what needs to be emphasized is that, during the movement of the seed-metering system, the net capacitance fluctuation ∆C cp described in Equation (5) is just about 0.1-0.5 pF, therefore, high precision frequency measurement must be guaranteed. In addition, the sinusoidal signal frequency f out (Hz) output by MAX038 is jointly controlled by the current regulating module and the external capacitor C f between 5-6 pins.The specific constraint relationship can be shown in Equations (6) and(7).…”