canze-icon-shadingIf you want to learn about your Renault ZOE electric vehicle, you’ve come to a good starting point. We will supply you with an app that displays driving stats and lots of interesting information about your car. All you need is a Bluetooth OBDII dongle or a super fast do-it-yourself build CanSee dongle, and an Android device. For a more detailed description of the app see the about or the screenshot page. There is a sister project for Apple iOS.

The app is available on Google Play store here.

With ZOE production coming to an end soon, and us only chasing issues (usually caused by Android upgrades or ever changing dongles), we feel it is time to put the CanZE development project to rest. We have really enjoyed the project, both maintaining an app for a fairly large user base (10.000+) as well as the nitty gritty reverse engineering, which all started in summer 2015.

CanZE will not be taken from Google play and the source code in its current state will remain available on Github for a long time. Also the present page will not be deleted!

If anyone is interested in taking over the head of the project, just manifest yourself. We are open to share the codebase as well as the present blog and whatever you need else to continue.

Thank you all so much for the many words of praise we have received.

This is a brilliant story of a ZOE repair by Dutch forum user “Jos Willems”. Here is the link to his post with pictures. You might need an account to access the pics and of course need to read Dutch or use something like Google translate, so I’ll give a short glossary here.

His Q210 stopped 3 phase charging which was a serious PIA as the home charger is 3 phase. Dealership stated the charger was toast and it “had probably taken with it several other components”, leaving the estimate in the 4.000 – 6.000 range, effectively rendering it a total loss. To add insult to injury the dealership offered 0 (zero) value if he were to buy a new car.

Not to be phased, he removed and disassembled the BCB (fairly easy on a Q model, but still “daring”) and found out it was not the dreaded welded relay contact. However the big triple filter cap assembly had seriously degraded; one cap was 5uF, which should be 100uF. After unsuccessfully trying to obtain the original OEM component, he decided to build a new capacitor bank from stock capacitors, if only to make sure this was the actual problem. Guess what? Car charges again as it should. He didn’t state labor time but my guess, excluding many frustrating phone calls was something like 8-12 hours. Component cost was 120 euro. Hats off!

I am usually staying away from criticizing the OEM. There are millions of cars on the road and s**t happens. Here though “the emperor has no clothes”: only because Jos was persistent, fairly knowledgeable and a bit daring he saved himself a ton of money and the environment a scrapped car. The cause was a the most simple component failing, misdiagnosed by the dealer and with basically zero support from said dealer and Renault itself.

By suggestion on the GitHub issue tracker by user dbwarrior1975, we added a simple but IMHO neat feature on the Voltage Heatmap screen. If a cell is being balanced the voltage is shown underlined. This is much more intuitive than the hex values on the Tech Charging screen.

However there is no clear known mapping between the bits in the balancing information and the cell numbers. Some help here would be appreciated. The indications may be horizontally or vertically mirrored, or possibly worse. Any feedback is appreciated. I expect the highest voltage (more red) cells to be balanced more.

As Google changed how permissions work in their apps, CanZE had to be updated in order to continue to work on more recent devices. This is why where has been a bunch of releases yesterday and one more this morning.

Symptoms are that the app crashes as soon as the settings page is being opened.

This is because actually CanZE needs the permission to view nearby devices, which a BT dongle is quite obviously 😉

If you want to help, please share any detail about this problem on the following issue:

https://github.com/fesch/CanZE/issues/781

SpeakEV user sr06 kindly send me this video. The mechanic is complaining about water/coolant ingress, but that is not why I am posting it. It gives a nice overview of the mechanical build-up of the Q motor. Especially the position sensor was new to me. Also the gearing is shown.

Quick update: 12100 devices reached on March 20th, exactly 100 days for 10%. This represents a 42% compound yearly growth, exactly corresponding with last years rate. If we approach things from the other end, we see a growth rate of 39% from today a year ago. Looks like things are all rather nice and steady. iOS news coming up soon.

Linked is a session I did with Lukas Bernhardt from the University of Lübeck, explaining CANbus, ISO-TO and how it’s used by the higher protocols. Serious Geek level but if you’re interested in that stuff, you might want to watch it. Léopold, one of the ZE50 team members also participated. Thanks Lukas for recording.

It’s just over 2 months ago that I reported 10.000 active devices with CanZE installed (Android stats only). We went over 11.000 on December 9th . 10% in just under 2 months, it doesn’t seem much, but a compound growth of 77% annually is nothing to sneeze at. I doubt we will reach that BTW; compared to December 2020 the real compound growth was 42%. Still great I would say. And that’s up from 29% the 12 months before that.

A big thank you to all users, new and existing, of CanZE!