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    Precision Planting

    BUILT WITH Qt

    precision-planting-1

    Digitalizing Agricultural Equipment

    Headquartered in Tremont, IL, Precision Planting is a global company offering solutions and technologies to farmers and agricultural equipment manufacturers worldwide. 

    Precision Planting is a leading provider of agriculture technologies that upgrade a farmer’s existing planter, air seeder, drill, sprayer, liquid fertilizer applicator, dry fertilizer applicator, and combine to maximize the performance of their equipment. 

    Built with Qt, the 20|20 GUI system helps farmers make better decisions as it monitors, controls, and diagnoses the field conditions and equipment performance in real time.

    10

    Months from hiring team to beta release

    Qt Solution Highlights 

    Real-time command and control of all of the embedded microcontrollers 

    Development environment based on Qt 6.4

    Improved CMake support, better QML compilation, and the better C++17 support

    Seamless integration to the rest of the C++ code 

    Code created once and run everywhere

    The cornerstone of our software offering is really our in-cab display, which we call the 20|20. Its 10.5" touch screen really gives farmers insight into the performance of their equipment during planting and harvest.

    Dave Wilcoxson, Senior Manager - Product Engineering at Precision Planting

    Watch the Full Interview

     

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    High-Definition Agronomic Data Visualization

    With its smart, intuitive interface, the Gen3 20|20 in-cab display lets farmers visualize performance and field conditions in real time, seed by seed. The entire system aims at automating processes and optimizing the production performance of existing agricultural equipment.

    The fully customizable display lets users add sensors and visualizations, control seed population, singulation, ground contact and margin, and review summary information.

    The 10.5" touch screen gives farmers insight into the performance of their equipment during planting and harvest. It handles the telematics and does near real-time command and control of all of the embedded microcontrollers that run on the mechanical elements that are out actually planting crops into the ground. Dave Wilcoxson, Senior Manager - Product Engineering at Precision Planting


    Read more about Qt for MCUs

    Our software heavily relies on mapping. So, when we migrated from Qt 5.15 to 6.2 the lack of Qt Location was kind of a big deal for us. But we decided that it was more important to have improved CMake support—better QML compilation and better C++17 support in Qt 6. And we agreed to use that opportunity to rewrite our mapping code that was based on Qt Location into our own in-house code that is more integrated into our graphics pipeline. This way, we were able to get all the benefits of going to Qt 6. 

    Dave Wilcoxson, Senior Manager - Product Engineering at Precision Planting

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    Choosing the Right UI Framework

    The engineering team at Precision Planting,  looked at different development environments for the creation of the 20|20 monitor—among which HTML5 and other JavaScript frameworks—to make a sort of browser-based interface.

    Our company has a long history of being a C++ shop, and ultimately, we really didn't think that we could provide the kind of seamless integration to the rest of our code with that path. It was honestly an easier step for us to use Qt than to totally change the game and go to a JavaScript or HTML-based system.

    Creating the current version of the 20|20 took about 10 months from hiring the team until the first customer ran a beta to actually plant products with it.

    I honestly don't think that would have been possible without us being able to leverage QML for doing our user interface.  Dave Wilcoxson, Senior Manager - Product Engineering at Precision Planting


    Read more about Qt in Industrial Automation

    I really like how efficient Qt is.  It's been very powerful for us to be able to write the product once and then run it everywhere. We have developers that are based on Mac, Windows, Linux, but they are all able to write code, basically knowing that it will run successfully on the target hardware. That's been very powerful for us, where our engineers are actually able to use the tools that they're most productive with to deliver our product.

    Dave Wilcoxson, Senior Manager - Product Engineering at Precision Planting

    Read more about Qt powering the Industrial Automation industry

     

    Qt in Industrial Automation