*Article* **Control System of a Motor-Driven Precision No-Tillage Maize Planter Based on the CANopen Protocol**

**Jincheng Chen 1, Hui Zhang 1, Feng Pan 1, Mujun Du <sup>2</sup> and Chao Ji 1,\***


**Abstract:** To reduce the cost of machinery and manual operation, greatly improve the efficiency of maize sowing, and solve the problems of slow sowing speed, unstable operation quality, and the difficult monitoring of the sowing process of traditional seeders, a control system for an electrically driven precision maize seeder based on the CANopen protocol was designed. In this system, an STM32 is used as the main controller, and the vehicle terminal is used to set the operating parameters, such as the spacing of sowing plants and the number of holes in the metering plate. The GPS receiver is used to collect the forward speed of the tractor. An infrared photoelectric sensor is used to monitor the working state of the seeder. In this study, tests were conducted on different evaluation indices. The results showed that the detection accuracy of the photoelectric sensor reached 99.8% and the fault alarm rate reached 100%. The qualified rate of sowing was more than 91.0%. Based on indoor test results, the qualified rate was higher when the grain spacing was larger. The field test showed, in terms of the seeding performance, that the control system had good stability. When the grain spacing was set to 20 cm and the operating speed was 6~12 km/h, the qualified index was more than 89% and the reseeding index was less than 1.93%. The variation in sowing performance between different monomers was small, and the seeding performance was good. The control system helps to improve the performance of the seeder.

**Keywords:** precision planter; motor-driven; CANopen protocol; photoelectric sensor; no-tillage
