We’ve made a significant change to the CanSee dongle firmware. Nothing is visible from the outside of course, but internally, the CANbus driver we used earlier has been replaced in it’s entirety with the native driver supplied by Espressif, the supplier of the ESP32 micro-controller used in a CanSee dongle. This solves a problem when using the most recent wafer versions of the ESP32 (v3) with the bus speed, and improves stability significantly.

This change is published in the development branch of CanSee and under test right now. Feel free to grab it and give it a spin. If we don’t encounter issues it will be released to production in a few weeks.

For those of you wanting to delve into the technical nitty gritty of things, here is the explanation. If you are into the ESP32, using it’s CANbus controller, and doing so using the Arduino framework, I would urge you to have a good look at that comment and it’s follow up. It took me way too long and way too much head scratching before I ran into that post and have my “ah-ha” moment.

Dutch forum user “Tomaso” supplied an overview and a few pics of an opened up PEC. The PEC is the combined charger – inverter of the R type ZOE models. It’s crowded in there. Thank you Tomaso!

Growth has slowed down a bit but that doesn’t mean we’re not baffled to find our app on so many devices! This week we broke through CanZE being installed on 9000 devices. Google’s definition is: “The number of active devices that the app is installed on. An active device is one that has been turned on at least once in the previous 30 days”.

If you have copied the code for the Node-Red implementation of the Renault API, be aware that the the kamereon_api key has changed. A few clever people figured out they are distributed using Google Firebase instead of in the code of the app, so decompiling is now useless. However, it’s pretty much all over the internet now, so here is a link to as far as I could quickly follow back.

BTW, there are now many more implementations for Node-Red.

Quick update. Last week saw a huge 3.4% uptake of users, or more precisely, “devices that have been turned on in the last 30 days and have CanZE installed”. This is twice the usual uptake in a month! As a result, we’ve handily past 8.000 users. I have not taken the effort to investigate if there is a specific reason such as a review in a popular channel, but in any case: Thank you!

Allow me to also do a mild vent. Reviews on the Google Play are very often super positive which we of course appreciate a lot, but now and then somebody slips in a 1 point rating with a “It doesn’t work with my car” review. No details, and never a response to a reply (which we always do). I checked, and Google Play does a notification on the device if a reply by the developer is issued. It’s a very frustrating endeavor. So, if you ever run into an issue, please report it on github: we do take pride in ironing out kinks! Feel free though to direct praise to Google Play 😉

Speaking of kinks: almost a full week with zero crashes now. Fingers crossed.

With the addition of the Ph2 and the new settings it’s fair to say we were not up to snuff when it comes to app stability. In December we significantly went over Google’s “bad behavior” benchmark when it comes to app crashes. As written earlier, we’ve been daily checking and meticulously cracking these and older lingering bugs and mostly updated weekly to avoid those from re-appearing. I am happy to announce that this weekend we lost the red “bad behavior in the last 30 days” tag.

We continue to trace and if anything possible fix each and every crash we get reported and release those fixes within a week of receipt. This is by far the most important reason for seeing recent updates in the play store and we appreciate you installing them to keep user experience as good as possible.