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Month: December 2017

By Posted on Posted in Geek talk

For those of you deep into home automation, using documentation compiled by Terrence Eden, me and Harm Otten wrote some Node-RED code to retrieve battery status from the same API that the the Renault Z.E. app uses. I’ve posted it on gitlab.

It outputs an MQTT message every 15 minutes. If there is more than one car associated with the login, more than one message is sent. A message looks like this

{“charging”:false,”plugged”:true,”charge_level”:100,”remaining_range”:132,”last_update”:1514654435000,”charging_point”:”INVALID”,”age”:”6:45″,”VIN”:”VF1AGVYA…..”}

In my setup the message finds it’s way to a dashboard on my Android phone using MQTT dash, a Node-RED dashboard and like all other MQTT messages a MariaDb database on my Synology NAS for logging.

By Posted on Posted in Car, ZOE No Comments

Somebody in the UK forum asked what would happen if you’d press the Start button while driving. Time for an experiment.

  • Pressing once: only thing happens is Cruise Control tripping off ;
  • Long press: nothing happens;
  • Five short presses: “ignition off”. Car starts coasting. No abrupt bleeding of speed. Brake servo remains primed, as is power steering.

To re-engage, let it coast for a few seconds, then short press again. It will do this even while the gear is in D!

One small software bug was detected while testing: the dashboard consumption / regeneration arc is gone and the “READY” label won’t go away until a “proper” cycle is done.

All testing was done done on the motorway, 100 km/h, 2013 Q210.

Disclaimer: don’t try this at home.

By Posted on Posted in Builds, News 4 Comments

We have an exciting new release coming up in a few days. Next to the inevitable bug fixes, we have a few new features we think you will love.

  • In the technical section, there is now a separate screen for the 12 volt battery. You can monitor here the voltage of the battery over time. Maybe we need to add current later. We’re not entirely happy about the color coded status lines, indicating charging and car status, but it was a needed compromise at this moment to show the changes in time.
  • We have slightly modified the consumption screen. We removed the capacity in Ah from the upper graph and replaced it with the SOC percentage from the lower graph. In the lower graph, we added a gradient representing the difference between real distance traveled and the change in the range indicator. It starts in the middle and will go up (red) if the range indicator decreases more than the distance traveled, or down (green) if it decreases less. We believe it is much more useful because it indicates if your initial planning, whatever that was, is still on track. If you love the old version, it has moved to the experimental section. We might depreciate it later though.
  • There is an experimental option to make a raw dump of all the frames we use. We need both your help and this activity to check out reports we’re getting about weird values when CanZE is used on Q90 and R90 cars.

Stay tuned and feedback, as always, is much appreciated.