It all started when I was 9 years old when my dad bought his first farm machine, which was an MTZ 552 tractor. A Hesston baler and trailer were also procured. Already that year I was driving alone and transporting the cob bales with him from the field to the farm. That’s when I fell in love with farm machinery.
My dad worked a lot with the Hesston baler, which was a very modern machine in the 90s.
When I was a teenager, I wanted to bal, too, but baling hay is extremely dangerous. Therefore, I could only start baling as an adult with great experience.
There was a lot of horror to hear about what happened during baling. Most of the time, the ignition of the baler, which is completely burned together with the tractor, or has just been learned, will curb the fire.
Already during my first season, I was constantly afraid of what it would be like to give in to a bearing now, as most of the fires are caused by broken bearings. Therefore, I periodically checked the temperature of the bearings by holding it by hand.
Surely there were times when it got so hot that it was impossible to hold because the steel was discolored from the heat. In the first days of next season, the idea came of what it would be like to have a device that could constantly monitor bearings, thus avoiding baling fires.
After that, I made a rudimentary prototype that worked but was pretty rude and didn’t look like I thought it would. I started searching on the internet to see who could implement my idea in a professional way. This is how I got to Zane Systems KFT, which is owned by my former colleague Zoltán Erdei. We worked together at NI Hungary where I was an SMT machine operator. After graduating from school, where I graduated as a technical computer technician, I worked for a few years at NI, but factory work is not for me.
Agrosentinels IoT bearing sensor
Within a few months, Zoli and his team made a prototype that was almost perfect. I tested it in the 2021 season, where it performed very well, including a bug. It was tested on a grain and silo combine, a baler, and even a semi-trailer of a semi-trailer, which measured the wheel bearings. On one occasion, I measured huge vibrations and high bearing temperatures at the right-hand fan bearing of the silage harvester. I told the operator about the unusual measurement values, which he had known before, because he had been driving the machine for 10 years and knew all his cartilage. According to him, the shaft may have bent at the beginning of the season and therefore the sensor measured outliers. Which will be replaced.
Hopefully we can predict these kinds of problems on a lot of machines with my “Idea”.
