Precision Farming

1
Precision Farming

• Jason Bould, Matt Febus, Michael Lang, Jon
  Gottschalk, Blake Reed
• Handheld scouting prototype
• John Deere

2
Whats Scouting?

• Back in my day
• New trends
• John Deere Pushing the envelope

3
Equipment

• The Hardware
• HP Jornada
• Garmin GPS
• Development Machines
• The Software
• JDMap
• Visual Embedded Tools

4
The First Steps

• Meeting John Deere
• Making Fields
• Development Dinosaurs
• Installing Software

5
Divide and Conquer

• GUI
• Parsing, Map Drawing
• PC Synchronization
• Handheld - GPS Communication
• Requirements Document, Busy Work, Fifth Wheel

6
Building Great Applications for the Pocket
PCMicrosoft Corporation
7
Key is Simplify

• Remove complexity
• Setup Device and Synchronization
• Flat controls Page-based dialogs
• Single tap
• Redesign of control panels
• Remove redundant menus, introduce tap hold

8
Optimize Simplifications

• Optimize for form factor needs and appliance-like
  behavior
• New shell arrangement (nav bar on top, menus on
  bottom)
• Minimize difficulty of input
• Auto save automatic memory management

9
App Platform Diagram
Bug Tracker
VB MFC ADO ATL CEF
GameX
HTML JScript XML XSL
Rapier Shell APIs
POOM
pIE
WinInet/URLMon
WinCE 3.0 (Cedar) Win32, OLE, Winsock, etc
10
Rapier UI APIs

• Maintain Windows affinity w/o being shrunken down
  Windows
• A few Rapier specific APIs
• Limited new APIs
• As automatic as we could
• Largely UI design shift

See the Rapier UI session
11
Tools

• Emulation
• Device direct
• Embedded Visual Studio

12
UI Design Principles

• The form factor is critical, optimize for it
• Design for the 80 / 20 case rather than the
  100 case
• More content, less app
• Reduce redundancy, and reduce effort
• Windows affinity, not wholesale copy
• Consistency with what users expect, not for its
  own sake
• Ease up on the eyes
• Simple NOT simplistic

13
Redesigned UI
App Name
New Shell Nav bar on top (start button title
bar), command bar on bottom, system tray on home
screen only New User Model Single tap, autosave
everywhere, close cards/documents (no cancel)
Flat look feel Pages instead of cascading
menus, flat buttons, fewer controls Feature
consolidation Removed redundant menus/buttons,
Redesigned control panel
Start Menu
Client Area
Command Bar
App Menu
New
SIP
14
Navigation Bar

• Foofy Design Stuff
• Start at 0,0, prime real estate
• Title should only be app name, should not change
• Instantly conveys a sense of place
• OK button, closes dialogs docs
• No cancel, just undo
• Read is often different from edit

15
Final Thoughts

• Copy us
• Less CAN be moreNO UI is Good UI
• Know your key scenarios design only for those
• Read is different from edit
• Minimize the difficulty of input
• 5mm stylus and 9.1mm finger
• Single tap, single tap, single tap
• Be good to the SIP WC_SIPPREF is your friend
• Shut down cleanly, were managing memory, one bad
  app makes us all look bad
• Support AutoRun CF storage

16
Main View for Operations
17
Rapier
18
Bug Tracker
19
PC/Jornada Synchonization
20
Why Synchronization?

• Need way to get information from handheld to
  desktop
• More than copying files
• Dates
• Tasks
• E-mail

21
ActiveSync

• Part of Windows CE Services
• Allows custom modules to be built
• DLLs (Dynamic Link Libraries)
• COM (Component Object Model)
• Standard interface

22
How ActiveSync Works (User)

• Plug in handheld device
• Serial or USB connection
• Works automatically
• Configurable

23
How ActiveSync Works(Developer)

• Synchronizes objects
• For us, JDMap files
• Resolves conflicts
• Desktop to Device
• Boundary files, pest lists
• Device to Desktop
• Pest information recorded

24
ActiveSync Screens
25
Progress

• Now Synchronizes all farms and fields
• Compares and copies each field
• Doesnt take much space
• Future Added options
• Select farms and fields to copy

26
ActiveSync Screens
27
Parsing and Drawing
28
Parsing Files

• Farm and field names file
• Coordinate files
• The pest file

29
Drawing the Field

• Given the field coordinates draw the field
• Draw the users current location

30
GPS/Jornada Communication
31
NMEAConnection

• Encapsulates all communication between Jornada
  and GPS
• 5 public methods Connect, StartStream,
  GetCurrentPos, KillStream, Disconnect

32
Under the Hood

• Implementation of the 5 public methods is simple
• Bulk of work done by friend function ReadThread

33
Under the Hood part 2

• ReadThread
• Runs in separate thread
• Monitors Com port for data from GPS
• Parses data and makes it available for
  GetCurrentPos method

34
It Works! (kind of)

• Problems to investigate
• GPS doesnt seem to conform to NMEA spec
• GPS sometimes spews garbage

35
Future Directions

• Map Zoom
• Auto Start Current Field
• Pause and Resume
• Editing Data Points