When the flood takes your electronics, you build something better
By Steven Coochin — 2026-06-02
This article first appeared in the June 2026 CCBG Telegraph.
The 2026 floods were hard on a lot of equipment across Central Queensland. Sheds went under, fridges were displaced, machinery got wet, and stuff floated away. Most of it dried out and kept going. But some of it didn't.
Some friends of ours, local graziers, run a Hayline accumulator. It's the unit that rides behind the square baler, collecting bales as they come out and arranging them into neat windrows across the paddock. After the water came through, it looked fine from the outside. The steel was solid. The pick-up was intact. Decades of hard Queensland haymaking, and it was still mechanically sound.
The electronics, though, were gone.
Floodwater had killed the relay boards, the counters, the terminal strips, and the cab switches. The control system that told the baler when to sideshift, when to unload, which side to drop on: all of it destroyed. Without that system, the accumulator couldn't do anything it was built for. Going into the hay season, it was, for all practical purposes, useless.
They sent us a message to see if we could do anything. We said we'd take a look.
They don't make them like this anymore
The Hayline is an Australian-built machine, and the moment you open the original control box, you can see why it lasted as long as it did. The wiring is heavy gauge, neatly run, and properly terminated. Every relay sits in a proper socket. The connectors are of industrial quality. Whoever built this thing did it right, and it held up for decades in the Queensland heat and dust before the water finally got to it.
The control system inside used a series of electronic counters, timer relays, and 12-volt relay coils to fire the clutch solenoids in the right sequence: sideshift at three bales, unload at four, alternating left and right to build tidy windrows across the paddock. Good, solid industrial electronics from an era when things were built to last a very long time.
The Hayline brand no longer exists. The manufacturer is long gone. Replacement control boards are not available anywhere. There are no parts suppliers, no service agents, no technical manuals with phone numbers on the back cover.
In short, it was irreplaceable.
The alternative was a new unit
A new accumulator of equivalent capability is a significant capital purchase. For a machine that is otherwise mechanically sound, writing it off and starting again is a very hard call to make, especially when the hay season is already bearing down on you.
Growing up, I was that kid who was always taking apart their toys and doing weird and wonderful things with electronic bits. That led me into building connected hardware and software systems for over thirty years, including commercial IoT projects for some reasonably large global organisations. IoT stands for Internet of Things, which is really just the broad term for any device that uses electronics and software to monitor or control something in the physical world: think remote weather stations, sensor networks across mining sites, or, in this case, an accumulator that knows how many bales it has made and what to do next. Before moving to Clermont, I worked on large-scale deployments of this kind of technology with IBM, PayPal, and Telstra, among others.
So when the message came through about the Hayline, this was familiar ground.
Two small computers, one wiring harness
I went through the system from the wiring harness up. The original 7-pin connector between the cab and the accumulator was still intact. The proximity switch was fine. All of that could stay. What I replaced was the control box and the electronics inside it entirely.
A microcontroller is essentially a tiny computer on a single chip: it runs code, reads inputs, and controls outputs, but unlike a laptop or phone, it does one job and does it very well. This setup uses two of them. The one in the cab is about the size of a paperback book spine, which is still remarkably small for something running the entire operator interface and all the decision-making. Out on the accumulator, the reflex brain is thumbnail-sized, doing exactly what it's told, quickly. Think of it like a dinosaur: big brain up front, small brain in the tail.
Out on the accumulator, the small brain handles everything the original relay board did. It reads the proximity switch, applies a software debounce timer matching the original half-second delay, counts the bales, and fires the right relay at the right time: sideshift at three bales, unload at four. It monitors the limit switches to know when each move is complete, and if no bale pulse arrives for 60 seconds while the machine is running, it flags a fault rather than leaving the operator guessing. It lives in a weatherproof box mounted on the accumulator itself, close to the solenoids it controls.
The cab microcontroller drives a colour touchscreen that displays the live bale count, relay states, the session row count, and any fault warnings. Everything the original counter display showed is now on the touchscreen in one place, with much more detail.
The microcontrollers communicate through the existing 7-pin harness: wired, reliable, and completely independent of any phone signal that almost certainly doesn't exist five kilometres out in the paddock. We could have gone wireless. We didn't need to, and out here, wired is better.
Hard buttons stay. Touchscreen is extra.
One principle I stuck to throughout the rebuild: if it wasn't broken, keep it.
The original toggle switches stayed. The indicator lights stayed. The physical buttons stayed. Hard buttons belong in agricultural machinery. Gloves happen. Direct sun on a touchscreen happens. You do not want the only way to trigger a manual unload to be a tap on a glass screen you can't see properly at noon in January.
The touchscreen is an addition, not a replacement. It gives the operator something the original system never had: a real-time view of what the machine is doing. Every relay state is visible. Fault conditions are displayed clearly. Row count is tracked throughout the session and saved in memory, so a power cycle doesn't reset the tally. You know more about what the baler is doing than you ever could with the original system, but you're not dependent on the screen to actually run it.
This is what we do
I'm proud of this project. Not because it was technically complicated, though parts of it were, but because it solved a real problem for friends who had no good options and a hay season coming.
Central Queensland graziers and farmers run equipment that is decades old, in locations hours from the nearest service centre, with no manufacturer support. When that equipment fails, the options have historically been limited and expensive. But, they don't have to be.
If you have got a piece of kit that the original manufacturer no longer supports, or a control system that needs rebuilding, get in touch. We are happy to take a look.
The Hayline accumulator is back in the paddock. The hay season is on.