Remote-Controlled Deere 8400 Tractor

Remote-Controlled Deere 8400 Tractor TRACTORS Miscellaneous 26-2-18 Cotton harvest is no longer a three-person job for Ray Albertson, South Mills, North Carolina. "We used to need one person on the cotton picker, one to run the boll buggy, and a third in the module builder to tramp down the cotton as it's dumped in," he says. Quite often, though, Albertson had to get by with two people running the three machines so someone had to continually get on and off the tractor. "I thought if I could just control tractor hydraulics by remote control, I could dump the buggy a little at a time without ever having to climb down from the module builder," he says. Albertson contacted Deere to see if such a thing was possible with his 8400 tractor. "The controls are all electronic," he says. "The company doesn't have any type of remote control system for the tractors and wasn't anxious to share anything about the electronics in it, either." Convinced that it could be done, Albertson got a service manual for his 8400 and went through the tractor's circuits, figuring out how to "talk" to its computer. Once he'd figured out which circuits he needed for the hydraulics and the throttle, he built an interface box so he could send signals to the tractor from a 4-channel Futaba remote control used for radio controlled model airplanes. "Deere uses potentiometers to tell the computer what position the hydraulic control levers are in. I bought some of the same potentiometers and wired them into my interface box, so I could reproduce exactly what the potentiometers tell the computer," he says. He also had to install a rectifier in the 12-volt power supply from the tractor, so he could step the voltage down to just 5 volts for his electronic interface box. He installed a toggle switch on the tractor's control panel that turns the interface box on or off. "When the switch is on, I can control the hydraulics and the throttle with the remote control. It automatically cuts off the tractor controls, so the hydraulic levers and throttle in the cab no longer work," he says. "When the switch is off, the tractor controls work, but the remote does not." He also built some safeguards into the system so errant radio signals can't accidentally trigger the tractor controls. Albertson's interest in and knowledge of electronics was key to making the modification, but he says it wasn't extremely difficult to do. "The hard part was figuring out which of the tractor's circuits I needed to use and how to tap into them," he says. Albertson spent about $200 on the Futaba controller and another $300 on parts and supplies to put the system together. He says it has paid for itself in the time and effort it saved. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Ray Albertson, 117 Bass Lake Road, South Mills, North Carolina 27976-9761 (ph 252 771-2479; E-mail: ralbertson61@home.com).

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