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Month: August 2017

By Posted on Posted in ZOE 1 Comment

These picture Harm took for us “on request” and are all taken from under the car looking up with the cover screen and battery removed.

Battery cavity. Bottom of picture is front side of the car. Note the orange HV power cable, black control cable, shiny pipes running from the A/C to the battery evaporator, black brake lines and the cutout on the right side where the HV cutoff will go into the cabin.

 

Other end of “the cavity. Notice the extra space for “the chimney”, the three holes for cooling air (middle for air going into the battery, others for outflow), same A/C and brake pipes and the bowden cables for the hand brakes.

 

Same area but taken a bit front-to-back. Here you can see the very flat air ducts going from the top and over “the chimney” to the fan/evaporator unit behind it. The coolant pipes hop over the chimney too.

 

Front side of the battery, showing the HV receptacle and the control receptacle. The former is connected to the actual battery through a beefy relay, current sensor, 275 amp fuse and the HV disconnect. The latter basically contains just a 12 volt bus to run the LBC computer inside the battery and the Electro CANbus.

 

Underside of the motor peeking from the front side of the car. It can be divided in three parts. Left side is electrical inlet (you can just see the slip ring connector) and the modest water cooling in/outlet. Middle is the actual motor. Right side is the 9.8 reduction gear and differential. Top shows some A/C pipes. Bottom shows the axles to the front wheels.

 

By Posted on Posted in ZOE 35 Comments

Dutch ZOE driver and enthusiast Harm Otten was #3 in The Netherlands to have the battery of his Q210 upgraded to the ZE40 type. He was allowed to take pictures of the procedure done only yesterday and I want to thank him and the Arend Auto Eindhoven dealership for sharing them in public.

Battery as it arrived

 

Packaging opened. Note the HV disconnect plug that ends up under the foot well of the right front seat

 

Lifting out the battery using an engine lift. Note the “chimney”. More on that later.

 

Rolling it to the car on the lifting table

 

Lifting it in “the cavity”

 

Bolting it against the chassis with 8 bolts

 

New decoration 🙂

 

Done!

By Posted on Posted in Hardware 10 Comments

A few days ago I tested that dongle I received and things were not looking good. Flow control commands are not accepted, and while I assured it is able to both send and receive data on the CANbus *) it does not like the replies to diagnostic commands the car puts on the bus.

I opened it up and the hardware is definitely different. A better build in my view, but the firmware (reporting the same version BTW, lies lies lies) does not work.

The very cheap but very well build “HH” dongle I bought was total crap. Not only did it not work, the firmware was easily send to lala-land.

IN the mean time, as my own KONNWEI died on me (I abused it a lot), I ordered a new one. If it works, I will post a link to the item here. If not, we need to explore a few new paths:
– see if we can work around the issues in software (might prove impossible or very hard);
– hand pick dongles that do work (complicated to manage, and who can you trust sending exactly that device);
– build our own hardware (out of reach for 99.9% of the users, and we are certainly not going to market a new design);
– focus on the Freematics ( http://canze.fisch.lu/freematics/ ) which can run firmware we can make (relatively expensive).

All in all this really stinks and we are NOT happy.