Robotic milking

Chips

Member
Location
Shropshire
Chips, Happy cows, Kevin and everybody else who is Robotic milking - your updates, thoughts, experiences and ideas were much appriciated. Please feel free to continue!

Okay here goes , I was about to post the following the other morning but alas the site was down and I was unable to share my excitement at having manually attached my first cow after over four years of struggling with wild heifers or hard udders on fresh calvers ,and it's so simple :) Just like we were discussing before the site crashed you just wait until the arm starts scanning the teats and simply slide the little collar up on the air shut off and all the cups go loose with vacuum and pulsation on ,whats really good is that it actually acknowledges that the cups are on once attached and records the milking , the arm still moves so can follow the cow if she moves , you can slide the sleeve back down as soon as the cups are on but it did leak air then so I left it off and pulled each cup off when the x link said to and turned air back on at the end . I did this with a random cow who came in just to try it out but can see no reason why it would not work the same with first time milking , what I plan to do with 1 st milkings now is allow arm to scan and try to attach and then if it can't get attached after loads of tries just slide the collar up and attach before it fails her ,this way it should have some idea of teat coordinents to help at next milking when heifer should be calmer .
This firmly reestablishes in my mind that Lely have the best robot , I had started to have mad ideas about trading it one day for a delaval but no more , it was so simple I can't believe I haven't worked it out sooner , I cannot remember who posted how to do it , was it 'cows4milk' ? A Big Big thankyou to them :D
 

clem dog

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
Co Antrim
There was a wealth of info on the robot threads alone. I know a person who works for lely and they all knew about the the boards on robots so sureky they were a good tool for voicing opinions.
 

cows4milk

New Member
Okay here goes , I was about to post the following the other morning but alas the site was down and I was unable to share my excitement at having manually attached my first cow after over four years of struggling with wild heifers or hard udders on fresh calvers ,and it's so simple :) Just like we were discussing before the site crashed you just wait until the arm starts scanning the teats and simply slide the little collar up on the air shut off and all the cups go loose with vacuum and pulsation on ,whats really good is that it actually acknowledges that the cups are on once attached and records the milking , the arm still moves so can follow the cow if she moves , you can slide the sleeve back down as soon as the cups are on but it did leak air then so I left it off and pulled each cup off when the x link said to and turned air back on at the end . I did this with a random cow who came in just to try it out but can see no reason why it would not work the same with first time milking , what I plan to do with 1 st milkings now is allow arm to scan and try to attach and then if it can't get attached after loads of tries just slide the collar up and attach before it fails her ,this way it should have some idea of teat coordinents to help at next milking when heifer should be calmer .
This firmly reestablishes in my mind that Lely have the best robot , I had started to have mad ideas about trading it one day for a delaval but no more , it was so simple I can't believe I haven't worked it out sooner , I cannot remember who posted how to do it , was it 'cows4milk' ? A Big Big thankyou to them :D

Wasn't my original idea, I just had the input that the vacuum should default to being 'on' with the air turned off. I'm definitely going to try it on the next trouble cow, hopefully I have as much success as you.

In an unrelated topic - those of you with multiple A4 Lelys - have you ever taken the time to measure the position of the 3D camera on one stall in comparison to the camera on the others? My one camera is over an inch difference in position from the other stall, a friend of mine who just spent a week in Lely school said a lot of guys are finding this to be a cause of failures when cows have access to two bots that the cameras are not mounted in synch. Confuses the position data the robot starts from when a cow decides to visit the 'other' stall. I'm going to try to get my cameras more in line today and see if it reduces the random failures. Remember - if you mess with the camera mounting to do a recalibration of the 3D camera before milking or things will really be screwed up!
 

fraggle

Member
Location
DL7
Okay here goes , I was about to post the following the other morning but alas the site was down and I was unable to share my excitement at having manually attached my first cow after over four years of struggling with wild heifers or hard udders on fresh calvers ,and it's so simple :) Just like we were discussing before the site crashed you just wait until the arm starts scanning the teats and simply slide the little collar up on the air shut off and all the cups go loose with vacuum and pulsation on ,whats really good is that it actually acknowledges that the cups are on once attached and records the milking , the arm still moves so can follow the cow if she moves , you can slide the sleeve back down as soon as the cups are on but it did leak air then so I left it off and pulled each cup off when the x link said to and turned air back on at the end . I did this with a random cow who came in just to try it out but can see no reason why it would not work the same with first time milking , what I plan to do with 1 st milkings now is allow arm to scan and try to attach and then if it can't get attached after loads of tries just slide the collar up and attach before it fails her ,this way it should have some idea of teat coordinents to help at next milking when heifer should be calmer .
This firmly reestablishes in my mind that Lely have the best robot , I had started to have mad ideas about trading it one day for a delaval but no more , it was so simple I can't believe I haven't worked it out sooner , I cannot remember who posted how to do it , was it 'cows4milk' ? A Big Big thankyou to them :D
;)

Not had to manually attach for a few months, but it certainly beats having to start up the old parlour
 

Chips

Member
Location
Shropshire
;)

Not had to manually attach for a few months, but it certainly beats having to start up the old parlour

Cheers Fraggle .
An engineer did tell me about this method about 2 years ago but I didn't know where the sleeve was that he was on about and couldn't see how the vacuum would come on anyway so soon forgot about , how life could have been easier if I'd only investigated a bit more back then especially for my Dad when he covers for me and doesn't quite know the sequence of scanning and when to hold front teats out of the way and when to release them to help get high rear teat cows attached for the 1st milking after calving , in fact I may hang a little sign by the sleeve saying Manual attach switch :D Having said this probably won't need to use it for ages now like yourself but it great to know it's there when you need it
 
Oh i could cry! So much information (probably the most discussed robot discussions in the world) and knoledge on robots and robotic milking gone in a puff of smoke. Quite a few of the discussion we had on there have shaped the way i farm today. Bouncing new ideas around and getting feedback from people who are in the thick of it and not a sales man telling you what he wants you to hear.
Hope to see some more friendly faces soon.
 

Peter

Member
Trade
[quote="cows4milk,

In an unrelated topic - those of you with multiple A4 Lelys - have you ever taken the time to measure the position of the 3D camera on one stall in comparison to the camera on the others? My one camera is over an inch difference in position from the other stall, a friend of mine who just spent a week in Lely school said a lot of guys are finding this to be a cause of failures when cows have access to two bots that the cameras are not mounted in synch. Confuses the position data the robot starts from when a cow decides to visit the 'other' stall. I'm going to try to get my cameras more in line today and see if it reduces the random failures. Remember - if you mess with the camera mounting to do a recalibration of the 3D camera before milking or things will really be screwed up!


Yes, that is critical for cows accessing multiple robots. The cameras need to be calibrate to almost identical numbers. Needs to be done with the camera calibration board. Just had that experince with a left and right hand machine. One camera was tipped to the side by one degree. The other was tipped one degree the opposite way. So it doubles the amount the arm was out to the side when a cow went from one bot to the other. I used a small level (angle degree measuring) to set them to level across (side to side of the cow) Then the 6 degree angle, plus measured the distance from the robot frame to side of camera, got those equal. Then recalibated both cameras with the calibration board and the numbers came up very close. Virtually no failures now. Get your service tech to do this and it will greatly improve attachment. Also the entrance gate has to be closed and the floor clean to take the background image. Watch for dirt on the camera face. I was amazed how a single strand of spider web hanging in front casued the arm to jerk around. Keep you software up to date. Been major improvements.
 

fraggle

Member
Location
DL7
Oh i could cry! So much information (probably the most discussed robot discussions in the world) and knoledge on robots and robotic milking gone in a puff of smoke. Quite a few of the discussion we had on there have shaped the way i farm today. Bouncing new ideas around and getting feedback from people who are in the thick of it and not a sales man telling you what he wants you to hear.
Hope to see some more friendly faces soon.

+1
Some of the posts (chips and happycows especially) has had a major influence on the way I farm now. (my robot has been running for 25 months now).
 

jimmer

Member
Location
East Devon
yippee you dont know how good it is to be able to post on a farming forum site i been trying to do so for years
i been following you guys and gals and have become more and more convinced about the future of robotic milking thanks to the likes of hapycows robocows et all
many happy posts to follow
 
welcome jimmer and thanks fraggle. I think this is going to be a very busy forum.

Jimmer it's not all roses. i had a nightmare of a night last night. had a small wire in the robot arm which had gone brittle break at midnight and milked them one at a time on manual all night bar 2 hours when i had a kip and turned the robot off. I still can't bring myself to call out a engineer at that time of night if i can avoid it. it just doesn't feel right. Luckily i had a nice snooze after dinner hence why i'm on here at nearly midnight!
 

AWJ26

Member
Location
Cornwall
Good to have the community back. But with no forum, i seemed to be able to do the evening checks in a 1/3 of the time!

Had the engineers here on thursday for some updates (Actually got a waterproof cover over the Y motor connections, Crazy that they send them out without it, the plug is basically like a PC parallel port) and it seems like the A4s will be getting the electric brushes fairly soon:), but still no news about the new MQC-C.
 

jimmer

Member
Location
East Devon
i recently came back from the isle of mann and accidently on purpose found out about the dairy farming there and discovered there are two farms both with two merlins as fullwood are the only main dealers there it was merlins or nowt yes we found them both and had a very interesting chat for a couple of hours with one of the farmers he could not find any negative points about his they been in since 08 and very few probs does anyone else rate fullwood robots they seem to me to be third fiddle to lely and delaval
 

Hillbilly

New Member
Location
eastern Canada
Okay here goes , I was about to post the following the other morning but alas the site was down and I was unable to share my excitement at having manually attached my first cow after over four years of struggling with wild heifers or hard udders on fresh calvers ,and it's so simple :) Just like we were discussing before the site crashed you just wait until the arm starts scanning the teats and simply slide the little collar up on the air shut off and all the cups go loose with vacuum and pulsation on ,whats really good is that it actually acknowledges that the cups are on once attached and records the milking , the arm still moves so can follow the cow if she moves , you can slide the sleeve back down as soon as the cups are on but it did leak air then so I left it off and pulled each cup off when the x link said to and turned air back on at the end . I did this with a random cow who came in just to try it out but can see no reason why it would not work the same with first time milking , what I plan to do with 1 st milkings now is allow arm to scan and try to attach and then if it can't get attached after loads of tries just slide the collar up and attach before it fails her ,this way it should have some idea of teat coordinents to help at next milking when heifer should be calmer .
This firmly reestablishes in my mind that Lely have the best robot , I had started to have mad ideas about trading it one day for a delaval but no more , it was so simple I can't believe I haven't worked it out sooner , I cannot remember who posted how to do it , was it 'cows4milk' ? A Big Big thankyou to them :D
have an A3 interested in this manual attach where exactly is this collar that you move for air shut off
 

fraggle

Member
Location
DL7
have an A3 interested in this manual attach where exactly is this collar that you move for air shut off
under the pannels, take the middle pannel off and its at the right hand side, hope this helps, will take a photo if i remember when I check round the cows later
 

Chips

Member
Location
Shropshire
Manual attach sleeve.png
have an A3 interested in this manual attach where exactly is this collar that you move for air shut off


If you open the top cover .it's on the right just above the top of the middle cover which you can see in the photo , push it up to switch off air
 

Attachments

  • Manual attach sleeve.png
    Manual attach sleeve.png
    11.9 KB · Views: 235

Is the NEC a better venue for LAMMA?

  • Yes

  • No


Results are only viewable after voting.

Red Tractor drops launch of green farming scheme amid anger from farmers

  • 1,035
  • 1
As reported in Independent


quote: “Red Tractor has confirmed it is dropping plans to launch its green farming assurance standard in April“

read the TFF thread here: https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/gfc-was-to-go-ahead-now-not-going-ahead.405234/
Top