Home › 2015 › November

Month: November 2015

By Posted on Posted in News, ZOE 2 Comments

When time is money (both re. your own time as well as how the operator calculates the rates), the following guidelines will help you, especially in winter. The’re all fairly obvious:

1. Try to avoid fast-charging starting at a high SOC to avoid entering the area where the car squeezes the charging power. This squeezing can start as low as 35% SOC when it is cold. Drive as far as possible to keep the charging power high for as long as possible.

2. Try to charge with the highest possible battery compartment temperatures. As driving increases the temperature substantially, try to fast-charge at the end of a drive, not i.e. the following morning. Fast charging itself also increases the temperature.

3. Quit fast charging as soon as you can. If there is a slow-charger at your destination, just fast charge until you can reach it.  This ensures fast-charging at the highest possible power and trades “real” waiting time (twisting thumbs) against “virtual” waiting time (car is charging for a longer time, but you’re not waiting for it doing nothing).

A rule of thumb is that squeezing from 43 kW starts at 30% SOC plus twice the battery compartment temperature for a Q210, and from 22 kW at 65% SOC plus the battery temperature for an R240. Note that this is for the 22 kWh battery. The 41 kWh battery behaves substantially different, but we don’t have enough data yet.

By Posted on Posted in Builds No Comments

With less new functions being added, a focus on getting things more stable and life beyond things CanZE requiring at least some attention, we are changing our release schedule. Today’s release will be the last mandatory Sunday release and we’ll decide on a per-case basis if a new release is warranted.

By Posted on Posted in Builds 8 Comments

Version 1.06 (2015.11.29) is now online on Github and shortly in also available through the Google Play Store.

We are still working on the compatibility issues with the Kangoo and even got a request to check the Twizy. So a lot of work still in progress.

Also check the experimental section as we try to read out the tires pressure … for those of you that have sensors. Any feedback on this is highly appreciate as none of us has those sensors installed …

By Posted on Posted in Teaser No Comments

Not many visible changes this week. Small changes on the charging and driving screen based on user feedback. In the experimental section, we added s tyres screen for cars equiped with TPMS. If you happen to have this feature on your car, give it a spin and let us know the results through github please (issue #235).

Under the hood we’re still working on strange Bluetooth instabilities and getting things back on track for the Kangoo and Fluence, which needs a lot of research.

We’re also working very hard on getting all the info we have (and not just the fields we use in CanZE today) in our database. It is a lot of tedious, lonely work but it is needed to move on.

 

By Posted on Posted in Teaser No Comments

You will not find many obvious changes this week’s release. We’ve taken a small step back from the rather crazy development cycle and the rest of our efforts have been focussed on fixing issues.

It seems we’ve been pushing the ELM a bit too hard; CanZE appears to freeze now and then, though it is usually the communication between the CanZE and the ELM. Please know it has our full attention, but it’s a hard one to crack as it’s really a bit of a random issue. We believe we’ve made some improvements though. Keep us updated (through github please!) and send us your logs please as it helps is pinning down what’s going on.

We’ve split the “Experimental” section into “Experimental” and “Technical”. Technical contains screens that should work, but are for the users that want to dig a bit deeper. At the same time, we’re cleaning up the “Main” activities to only display the information that matters most.

The Cell Voltages Heatmap has a new function that you should actually never see: if a cell turns bright red, it means it has a serious problem. The algorithm used is borrowed from Nissan: If the delta between the mean and lowest cell voltage is greater than then 1.5 times the delta between the mean and the highest cell voltage, it is considered bad. This check is only valid (and will only be performed) if the pack’s SOC is roughly 25% or lower.

EDIT: I was not aware that the Leaf uses a different chemistry for the battery than the Zoe. The red cell algorithm used may, or may not be valid. Don’t rely on it.

Here is a (faked) example

Screenshot_2015-11-15-23-18-41 (1)

Have a great remainder of your weekend!

By Posted on Posted in Builds 1 Comment

Release Version 1.04 (2015.11.15) is ready and can now be downloaded from the Github releases page. As soon as Google has processed the updated publishing request, the new version should also be available in the Play Store.

Having received some comments about this, I want to stress that there will always be an APK of CanZE available as simple download. We do not plan to exclusively publish releases through the Google Play Store …

By Posted on Posted in Teaser No Comments

Last weeks release was not very stable with respect to the Bluetooth connection. A lot has been done to improve that, but if you have still have problems, please switch on “log to sdcard” in the new setting screen, so we might find some more remedies with the extra logs.

The Consumption screen has changed a lot and we hope you like it!

We removed a lot of overly technical information for the charging and braking screens based on feedback we got. Things are simpler now and more focussed on the things that matter. The old charging screen is still available in the experimental screen and we’re contemplating creating a third menu screen called “Technical” for the more detailed information.

As always, we appreciate your feedback. Enjoy!

By Posted on Posted in Builds 3 Comments

So here we go with version 1.03 with all the changes announced yesterday.

If you wonder that happened to version 1.02, this is easy: version 1.01 contained a nasty bug that we had to erase immediately and each update in the Google Play Store needs a mandatory higher version than the previous one.

Have fun!