The Range screen has been fixed and needs some explanation. In essence it compares the available range calculated by the car to three different ranges:
The first number is a range based on the current energy content of the battery and the worst consumption;
The second number is the same, based on average consumption. One would expect this to be the same as the car reported range, but it isn’t;
The thirst number is the same but using the best consumption.
The consumption numbers are calculated by the car. The second number can made a bit worse using the slider to adjust for sporty driving. In my case, leaving it at -10% seems to be about right.
CanZE has no “phone home” capabilities, but Google acquires quite a bit of data and I thought it would be fun to give you a bit of an insight at what we’re up against.
We are seeing a fairly consistent growth rate of 40% per year. The metric we use is “Installed on devices that have been online in the last 30 days”. As I write this in early March we’re seeing a total of roughly 4400 active installs.
Not surprisingly more than half of the installs are in Germany, France and the UK.
The top 6 devices are all Samsungs and a quick addition of all Samsung branded devices added up to over 1300.
Of the operators what was interesting to see is that about 20% have no operator listed. I interpreted that as devices having a second life without SIM card for basically CanZE only. I like that. Although those would be slow to update and probably miss out on the news bar.
Android versions: about 2700 are on Android 7 or higher, but believe it or not, 60 are on Android 4 and just over 300 on 5.
For health statistics we get quite detailed aggregated reports on crashes and hangs. The last couple of weeks you have seen quite bunch of new releases and that is because we really stepped up our efforts to root out as many as possible and as soon as we see them. To give some sort of idea, in the last 7 days, and filtering out devices that have not been updated for months we’ve seen:
One non responsive screen
Eight different clusters of crashes, 6 of which were reported only once.
The two were basically the same and accounted for 13 actual crashes. It is a silly bug in the Tyres screen.
As you can imagine it is that last problem we try to quickly focus on and it shouldn’t be a surprise that it is already fixed in the development branch and it will be fixed in the next release. And so are 3 of the single instance ones. For those interested, you can always check out what is in the pipeline here.
When we release about 35% of the active devices are updated within a day, and 70% within a week. But also note that if we assume the three last releases to be “current”, about 18% is not in that bracket after a week. A year after a release is superseded we still see about 2% of that release on active devices. And that is why we need to filter out some of the crashes.
Unfortunately we can’t see how much CanZE is actually used*) so it’s not easy to put those in perspective, but then again, less than 3 crashes per day on a 4000 installed base is too much but not crazy.
*) No, the new news bar does not tell us that. It fetches the news bar from github and we don’t have statistics about it’s usage.
As much as we like to cover the full ZE spectrum of the Renault brand, the time has come to end support for the Fluence ZE and Kangoo ZE. We have no access to these cars, there are no developers that do and there are active communities and apps for them. FluenceSpy by Alexandre Moleiro is one. Frankly, we never were able to do a good job there and we don’t want to promise more than we can deliver with at least some quality. It’s hard enough to maintain CanZE for the 90 and 110 models without free access to them.
The planning for deprecation is as follows
March 2019: this announcement
May 2019: message in the news bar in CanZE
July 2019: removal of specific code from the App
Of course you can still try to use CanZE in said models but some functions will not work properly anymore and we won’t accept any bug reports or requests that are specific for the models.
On the less sad side of things, a new Twizy owner has taken on the challenge to give the Twizy support a good crank. Stay tuned for news in that department.
The second print (blue) is finally usable, but I refined it to make it fit more neatly. The third print (orange) is the last one I did today and the components of my previous prototype fit perfectly.
The print may not look perfect, but hey, is quite a step above the “duck tape version”, isn’t it?
As the original case doesn’t fit the needs and can’t be easily modified to do so, I just decided to create a new one. 3h of printing to go … let’s wait and see 😉
As you probably noticed, a lot of work is being done. We’re gearing up for a new release again.
Added total kWh and charge counts in the (experimental) Charging history screen. Very useful if you are checking out a used ZOE.
Several bug fixes and internal improvements.
Some appearance cleanup.
Deleted Dutch language.
Some other announcements and tidbits
The usage of CanZE is growing more than 33% per 6 months.
Because of the frankly staggering numbers we’re now focusing more than we used to on usability, consistency and stability.
Largest countries (by far) are Germany, the UK and France, together more than 50% of the installs.
As a result, German, English and French are the installed default languages on over 70% of the CanZE users phones (meaning Android languages, not CanZE languages)
We are planning on discontinuing all but English, German and French language support and are in an active process of finding committed, tool based language maintainers for those. So if you want to become such a language maintainer (the named ones or another one), please contact us through the CanZE Github page.
After this release, it might be quiet for a while: while we urge anyone with even mild tinkering skills to build the CanSee dongle and dump the commercial one, we realize that over 99% of the users actually use and will keep on using those. We’re in a process of research and change to massively improve the stability of the ELM based dongles and we’re pretty sure most users will be very pleased when it’s done. However, it will take considerable time.
Quite a while ago I did a strictly theoretical calculation on ZOE’s acceleration. You can find the post here. The end result was 8.9 seconds. I think in reality it is somewhere between 11 and 13; I should really do a test for fun but I don’t have a free runway available for that.
Anyway, I did the calculations again for the R110 under the exact assumptions, and in addition assumed that the maximum power level during acceleration was 88 kW. I have no idea if this comes close.
Car starts it’s accelerates exactly like the Q210/R240/R90 models: 5.0 m/s², but the R110 hits it’s (higher) power limit a bit later (2.36 seconds) and a bit faster (11.9 m/s). The remainder of the acceleration is at full power, reaching 100km/h (27.8 m/s) after a total of 7.6 seconds, roughly 14% (1.3 seconds) quicker. That 14% is probably pretty close to the real world difference.
It’s only been an week, but we feel the need for some changes to be rolled out
Fixed negative numbers in Trip (Driving)
Much faster startup if you use the new, fast CanSee dongle
Fixed an issue that mostly produced wrong numbers in miles mode
Implemented a “news” bar on the main screen we can use to alert users
Moved Leak currents to Technical and made it more reliable
Fixed values not displaying in the experimental BCB screen
The trip function basically gives you a “Trip C”. Reset it by tapping it’s value area. It relies on trip B values supplied by the car so if you reset Trip B in the car, Trip C needs to be reset.
BCB and Leak Currents are helpful tools to assess charging problems. Note that HF Leak currents should not exceed 300 mA (preferably significantly lower), and that Ground resistance cannot exceed 150 or 200 ohms depending on model, and again, should preferably be significantly lower. On my home charger it is 11 ohms.
At this moment two rather serious discussions are going on in the issues section for CanZE to which I’d like to draw your attention and invite to participate.
First is the multi-language functionality. We, the current developers decided we are not willing and able to maintain the current language versions. Basically our stance is: own or remove. We maintain the app in English, but almost all strings are stored in separate, language sensitive XML files. I have maintained the Dutch version, but a quick check in the Dutch ZOE forum didn’t show any interest so we will ditch it in the next release. For the other languages (FR, DE, SL and ES), we need owners who are willing and able to maintain the language file, in XML and using GIT for version management. From our side, we can postpone anything but “crash” releases by say a week for language updates. Without a serious and committed owner for each language, we will remove it and keep doing so in the future. The app will default to English. To be honest, we see this as a one way street. Please comment if you want in the specific issue thread only.
Second is online data logging. We have written about our stance several times, but the truth is, it is a recurring issue in the comments, in some fora and also a few times in actual development. I have written my personal thoughts about it in the open issue here. This is not cast in stone, but it hints how far I am willing to go myself in terms of development effort and preference regarding architecture. Serious input is appreciated, also on the issue thread on github please.
