Comment by ikidd

That's all blown way out of proportion. I have a stack of 10k page manuals for diagnosing and repairing every piece of green iron on the place. Honestly, I've been considering training an LLM so I can make better use of the manuals, they're so incredibly detailed it's hard to find the thing you're looking for.

The only thing Deere "locks down" is that some of the parts have a CANbus address that you need to get a tech over to program the controller to recognize the part, and do the same if you replace a controller.

It's not some nefarious anti-farmer thing, it's because of the way the controller network works. In fact, I've used a CANbus sniffer on the bus and everything on there is in the clear, they don't even encrypt the messages.

The only things I've sent to town to get fixed was because I didn't have time to diagnose it, or it was an insurance claim and I wanted warranty. Blowing $80,000 worth of innards out the back of a combine wasn't a job I wanted to tackle right then (but I probably should have, I wasn't happy with the attention to detail in the repair).

So the upshot is, don't believe every terrible story about Deere you hear. Just the one where they charge too goddamn much for parts.