New Holland North America, Inc.

Ford New Holland, Inc.

Cnh Industrial Italia S.p.a.

Bert Jf Paquet

Guoping Wang

Wilfried E Gunst

Antoon G Vermeulen

Guy H Osselaere

Patrick F Geladi

Ricccardo Morselli

An agricultural harvesting machine, such as a forage harvester, comprises a feeder means for feeding crop material to crop processing means and a feeder arrest means for immediately arresting at least a portion of said feeder means upon detection of a foreign object. Said arrest means comprises a ratchet wheel mounted onto the drive line of said feeder means and an electrical actuator means for loading a pawl into engagement with said ratchet wheel. The harvesting machine comprises a means for automatically monitoring the good operative condition of the electrical actuator means and the means for generating an alarm signal upon detection of a bad operative condition by said monitoring means. The monitoring means checks the condition of the electrical actuator and its circuitry by applying a voltage thereto during a short interval and monitoring the response during or immediately after said interval. The length of this short interval is chosen to preclude actual engagement of the pawl. This test procedure can be executed automatically at regular intervals.

Feeder arrest for use in a harvesting machine

A self-propelled agricultural harvesting machine (1) is provided with a single channel network (300) for serial communication of digital data messages between programmable microprocessors (215, 218) in a multi-master configuration. The messages are encoded according to an advanced serial communications protocol and are available to all microprocessors (215, 218). The network comprises an optical transmission network with an active starpoint (230) and plastic optical fibres (231), which link the nodes which lay physically far away from each other. An RS232 socket, which is linked to the network (300), enables loading of data and programs to the microprocessors (215, 218). Thus is obtained a reliable and flexible control system for the machine settings, which comprise on-road and off-road (harvesting) parameters. The introduction of a wide range of automatic control routines simplifies to a large extent the tasks of the operator during operation.

Method and apparatus for the control of self-propelled agricultural

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Brugge, Belgium

Bert Jf Paquet