Category: Car

By Posted on Posted in Car, ZOE 1 Comment

This is a guest post by SpeakEV user modrich.

I managed to locate and replace the blown 10amp fuse that feeds the reverse light, camera and parking sensors. The reason for this post is that the fuse isn’t located in the cabin fusebox. The fuse is actually under the USM module which is located to the right of the 12v battery under the bonnet.

The USM module resides under this cover. To access it, release the 4 tabs on each corner of the cover (2 at the front, 2 at the rear) and slide 2x red latches (front and rear of the cover) to the right

This is the USM’s top side.

Lifting it up reveals the fuses and connectors. I was lucky as the fuse I was looking for was the red 10amp fuse which is relatively easy to get at with the fuse puller from the main fusebox, but if it had been any of the fuses at the back of the USM it would have been a different story as this would probably have meant unplugging the module, which I wouldn’t recommend without knowing the correct procedures for doing so. Putting the fuse back in was a fiddle, a pair of small bent nose pliers might have helped, but just about managed holding it between 2 fingers. So all done, and everything back to normal and working again

I ended-up in this situation after I tried to replace the reverse light bulb whilst the car was still in reverse and shorted the fuse, so note to self: Isolate or switch-off before replacing electrical components.

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 Car, ZOE 7 Comments

This time made by car mechanic of one of Bochane Almere, a ZE dealer here, through forum user “hachy”. Thanks for letting us use them!

Nice!
Reprogramming
Battery in situ. note the HV cable connected

 

Lifting the battery from the packaging

 

Careful now
Lift with positioning tool
Measuring leakage between chassis and the 400 volt bus at the HV fuses for the Climate compressor

 

Chimney closeup. Center is air in, others air out
Underside, battery removed

Edit: and lots more, with video, here.

 

By Posted on Posted in ZOE 2 Comments

See this post for the sometimes problematic cable locking mechanism.

Today my 2013 Q210 ZOE was at the dealer for it’s 4 year maintenance. I arrived there a tad low on battery so I asked them if they could please hook it up once they were done with it. No problem of course. Just as I arrived to collect it, I saw the chief mechanic getting in (it was already hooked up), so I walked up to him first. He was a tad nervous and said he had updated the charger firmware and now he noticed it wasn’t charging. I walked around only to hear the somewhat familiar cam wheel “whee whee” noise from the locker mechanism, so I joked: “well, luckily my friend, I do know what is wrong. Hooked the thing up again and all was dandy, though now of course I had to wait a bit to make it home.

Chatting along he told me the locking motor was now a new part number and maybe I wanted to replace it (80-ish euro). I decided to go for it. I have had a few early terminated charge sessions, and like the inner flap hinge, sometimes Renault does not always acknowledge a warranty issue, but they do improve the design over time. I’ll report back on this.

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

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 ZOE 1 Comment

There are two ways to reset the trip part, which makes the car “forget” driving and battery behavior.

Reset “light” is through R-Link. This will reset the range indicator (GOM) to a value proportionally  related to the capacity of the battery. In effect it forgets how (un)economical you have driven. It was used in the old days to check how healthy the battery was.

There is also a harder reset, called the “two pedal reset”. Keep the driver door open, start the car, keep the gear in N, press and hold both pedals and press up key on the windshield wiper control until the averages message appears in the display. Now hold that button. First it displays the current values, then it starts flashing, then the average values display —. Now let go. This reset seems to also make the battery computer (LBC) loose quite a bit of acquired parameters and the GOM shoots up to a crazy value.

The car will rather quickly re-learn the state of affairs. Just don’t rely on the range indicator on your first trip after a reset.

By Posted on Posted in Geek talk, Twizy 5 Comments

Thanks to the kind people running the OVMS project, we have access to quite a bit of documentation on the Twizy. Unfortunately, the current developers are unable to implement this knowledge into CanZE, mainly because lack of Twizy to play with :-). If developing CanZE taught us one thing, it is that it is virtually impossible to add functions without the car available; remote testing simply doesn’t cut it.

So, if any volunteer is available, we would be happy to take him or her into the team. There is no hard prerequisite (hint: when I started I had not written a single Android program), but it would be fair to say the following would help, in diminishing order of importance:

  • Owns a Twizy, ELM dongle and an Android device, and is willing to play and experiment with it;
  • Can bear to stumble along and spend too much free time;
  • Has done some development in Java or C++;
  • Has done some Android development.

We would love to hear from you!