Case Study № 1  ·  Equipment Maintenance  ·  Right to Repair

The Equipment Maintenance Assistant A working tool, a right to repair artifact, a teachable process

Most farm equipment maintenance gets tracked on clipboards, in spreadsheets, or in someone's head. Service intervals get missed. Parts are forgotten. Knowledge walks off the farm when an operator leaves. Off-the-shelf ag software is built for industrial operations and ignores smallholders and microfarmers. So we built our own — a farmer can do that now, with M3 as a coding partner.

The before

The canonical demo uses three real machines from a working farm near Almonte, Ontario: a 1967-1975 vintage John Deere 1120 tractor (5,335 hours, no service history on file), a 2022 Polaris Ranger EV utility vehicle (145.2 hours, lead-acid battery pack of unknown age), and a 2021 Sunward SWE18UF excavator (64.2 hours, almost nothing recorded). All three are operational. None of them have anything more than a single recent hour-meter reading in their maintenance log.

That's the actual pain. The machines run. The data is missing. The risk is silent: a valve adjustment interval missed, a hydraulic filter forgotten, a battery pack with a weak cell you don't know about until you're stranded in a pasture. This is the world this tool is built for.

What the tool does

Paste in a JSON equipment list (or load the demo). The tool produces, for each machine:

  1. A maintenance calendar keyed to that machine's service intervals, with DIY-able steps flagged separately from steps that need OEM tooling or a dealer.
  2. A parts list with OEM part numbers, aftermarket equivalents, generic specs, and a "source independently" column. The right to repair move is built in: nothing here forces you to the dealer.
  3. A troubleshooting guide with common problems, likely causes, and what to check — generated as a starter, editable, intended to grow with the operator's experience.
  4. A handoff document for new operators: machine identity, daily checks, safety notes, who to call. The artifact that keeps knowledge from walking off the farm.
  5. A printable laminated shop card per machine, sized for the wall above the workbench. The low-tech artifact that survives a power outage.

The output is plain HTML, printed, or copied. No accounts, no logins, no SaaS. The JSON equipment list is the source of truth. The farmer owns it, the farmer edits it, the farmer hands the file to a neighbor.

What M3 enabled here

1. Domain translation. M3 took the vocabulary of right to repair (DRM, telematics, OEM lockout, knowledge commons, operator sovereignty) and the vocabulary of small-farm maintenance (grease intervals, valve clearances, hydraulic return filters) and turned both into a working tool with neither reduced to the other. The Deere's vintage openness, the Polaris's modern-but-DIY-friendly EV architecture, and the Sunward's geography-locked-not-DRM-locked situation are all distinct right to repair stories — the tool handles all three without flattening them.
2. Pedagogical scaffolding. The conversation that built this is readable. A neighbor can pick up the planning chat and the build log, see how a non-coder worked with M3, and run the same process for their own equipment. The intake format is a JSON file the operator can edit by hand. The handoff doc is meant to be read by the next operator. The tool itself teaches by showing its own structure.
3. Sovereignty by design. Static site, plain HTML/CSS/JS, no build step, no framework, no backend. The equipment data is a JSON file the farmer can keep in git, on a USB stick, in a farm-shed Raspberry Pi, or print and re-key. There is no platform. The means of production — and maintenance — belong to the operator.
4. Customization at the edge. A 1967-1975 Deere with 5,335 hours and a 2022 electric UTV with 145 hours and a Chinese-built compact excavator with 64 hours are three radically different machines. The tool does not assume any of them. The JSON equipment list is the operator's list, in the operator's structure, edited in the operator's text editor. M3 built the framework; the farmer builds the content.

The tool

Below is the working tool. The equipment list is pre-loaded with the three real machines from the Almonte farm. Edit the JSON, click Generate, and the outputs re-render. The JSON is yours to copy, edit, and re-use.

Edit any field. The structure is documented in the file itself — start with the demo and modify.

The same file you see here is the canonical demo. The Reset button restores it.