To use a prescription map, the user must first upload the map
to their user cloud account. An important note here is that the
user will define the units for the prescription map when upload-
ing it. If the incorrect units are selected, incorrect rates will be
used during the job.
When a map is uploaded, the cloud server does a simple check
to ensure that the map is valid. Following this, a
cloud sync is necessary to pull the prescription map down from
the cloud onto the user’s iPad. At that point, the prescription
map is being stored locally on the iPad and can be used at any
time.
Once downloaded to the iPad, the user can assign a
prescription map to a particular product when creating a job.
This process includes selecting a particular prescription map
and corresponding product column from the dbf file. There is
also the option to adjust the prescription map rate by a multi-
plier percentage. This value will scale all rates provided by the
prescription map by a anywhere from 50% – 200%.
NOTE:
The product profile’s normal application rate will be used
as a fallback for when the system is in an area that has not been
defined by the prescription map.
Once the job is started, the prescription map for a particular
product will be displayed when that product is painted on the
map. The target rate will automatically adjust based on the pre-
scription map and system will not allow for the user to override
this rate.
Because the system uses electric motors, each section’s rate
is controlled individually according to the prescription map.
The system also averages the rates over an entire section. This
means that the displayed application rate may change gradually
during zone transitions.
The iCon system requires that prescription maps adhere to the
following constraints:
• When uploading maps to the cloud, there is a total file size
limit of 20 MB.
• The total area of the prescription map must be less than 1200
acres.
• The system reads NH3 prescription maps as lbs of actual NH3,
not lbs of N. However, the system will display all values for NH3
as lbs of N.
• Prescription maps cannot utilize a zero rate either, the rate
must be entered in accordance to the minimum rate of the roller
used.
Additional Notes:
The attribute database format for the .dbf component file is
based on an older dBase standard. This database format
inherently has a number of limitations:
While the current dBase standard, and GDAL/OGR (the main
open source software library for reading and writing shapefile
format datasets) support null values, ESRI software represents
these values as zeros — a very serious issue for analyzing quan-
titative data, as it may skew representation and statistics if null
quantities are represented as zero
• Poor support for Unicode field names or field storage
• Maximum length of field names is 10 characters
• Maximum number of fields is 255
• Supported field types are: floating point (13 character
storage), integer (4 or 9 character storage), date (no time
storage; 8 character storage), and text (maximum 254 character
storage)
• Floating point numbers may contain rounding errors since
they are stored as text
The zone number really only represent processing time and not
so much limitations of usage of the rx maps. The application
will spend time reading in a storing all the zones and then it will
apply it to the map. Its during this application process that we
get rid of all notions of zones. So the zone number only affects
how long it will take to start the job and not so much in job
performance.
