A german video about CanZE on ZOE Ph2
Thank you “Silent Energy”
Category: News
This is a speculative post
While we’re certainly not done untangling the ZOE ZE50 and new ZE40 (together called ZOE Ph2), we’re pretty confident we’ve cracked the basics fairly well.
ZOE Ph2 is a significantly different car than the old models and required additional code to access the car’s computers. We had to make changes in the CanSee dongle and the ELM327 (KONNWEI) dongle driver has much improved, also performance wise. And once again, lots and lots and lots of testing in cold winter nights on driveways, city streets and even road trips. While all this was going we’ve also been doing some internal refactoring to facilitate the different models in a less cluttered way, together with an improved process to do our research, read, finding the fields we need to make CanZE do it’s thing. All this despite the modest outside looking the same, so maybe we’re more impressed than you are!
Having said all that, our short term effort is clawing back on decreased stability that was introduced by all the code changes made in the last few months. Crashlytics which anonymously provides post-mortem information is a huge help and as I write this, all known crashes are tackled either in the current production release or ready for the next release, so please do update if you haven’t already. You, the thousands of end users are the heroes doing the cold harsh field testing. Thank you for that.
So what’s the speculative part? Well, with the Twingo EV now on the market we’ve had a bit of time to take a look and we can possibly make it work. This is not a promise: history taught us we couldn’t make the ZE50 work until enthusiastic and knowledgeable team members actually owning these cars were co-developing. But with above changes and already one enthusiastic tester in the field, we might just crack it. Still, it’s a tough cookie with slower research cycles. But who knows? If it works we could maybe add say a Twizy the same way? Even more speculation!
Quick status post and a TPMS question
- looks like we have solidly past 6200 users. A user is defined as having the app installed on at least one device running under it’s account, for somewhere in the last month. It is not a run metric.
- Guess what I have on my driveway now on loan for a full week. Watch this space……..
- I have understood that most TPMS functions are available on the ZE50 natively. Would it be prudent to disable them for a ZE50? Or asked differently, is there anything a ZE50 needs regarding TPMS that is NOT already natively in the car and that we offer today for the earlier models?
Software for processing logged research data
Anyone who has played with the Research facility, or any log file really, knows the results can be massive and hard to process.
Massimo Ceraolo made a small post-processor that splits up the data per field, timestamped from start-of log. The output files (one per field) are pretty easy to convert into plots with Excel or other programs.
His software can be found here, the PDF has many more details.
Thank you!
Thank you all for installing and running no less than 5000 CanZE instances on Android! A humbling number for a total amateur project.
Small UI changes coming up
In the next release you will notice some UI changes.
- All screens will now have an Android style “Home” button, a left pointing arrow left of the title.
- The main menu will no longer display the settings icon in the title. In line with conventions Settings has moved to the Three-dots menu.
- The OK and Cancel buttons in the Settings screen are removed. Either pressing the Android return button at the bottom of the screen or the new “Home” button left of the title will save the settings and return to the menu screen. However, you can still Cancel using the Three-dots menu.
- “Please wait” type of messages are being gradually replaced with a blue spinner, i.e. when opening the setting or when fetching all data.
This draws CanZE a little bit more into Android UI conventions and should make using it slightly more intuitive.
New release coming up
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.
Post release activities
Things have not been quiet since the last release. In the development version, more languages have been added (German and Slovenian), thanks to several volunteers. Thank you! Also, a new release makes users go through a lot of screens and quite a few bugs have already been found. And fixed. We try not to do hotfixes, unless (like with this last release) CanZE really crashes. So, the more benign bugs are fixed or being fixed in the development branch.
As always, feel free to report issues on the github issue tracker, where you can also see what other reported and what has already been closed.
We also got some feedback on the new “Clima” screen. Notably, there was a request to also show the power the climate system takes. This has not been proven possible (maybe “not yet”, see below), so after some experimentation, we added the compressor RPM as a separate graph to the climate screen. Here’s a teaser (pardon the Dutch).
Finally, we are very happy to have been able to crowd-fund the acquisition of a CLIP system (yes, a clone). Many users made a contribution to make this possible. Thank you! We really hope we can dissect the BCB (the charger) with it, as it is unwilling to give us it’s secrets just like the other computers do. Stuff has been ordered and we can’t wait to get our hands on it. We’ll most certainly report back here when it’s arrived, and later if it was able to give us what we want! Stay tuned.
Next release coming up
We are close to releasing the next version, probably next weekend as we test for silly errors this week. Features:
- Multi-language is now possible, and added languages (Dutch, French, and we think we’ll manage German too. Thank you all volunteers!)
- Added a lot of diagnostics. This part still needs a lot of work. For some known ECU’s you now have:
- Real descriptions of DTC’s, something like “Battery voltage:value below threshold”;
- Dump of all diagnostic parameters to a file.
- Added a Climate screen;
- Changed the Firmware screen. This more expanded info is needed to import ECU definitions. More on that in a separate post later;
- Lots of bug fixes in graphs and layouts.
Under the hood things have massively changed too.
- Tons of cleanup, added comments and removal of old code;
- Simplified and improved our development chain;
- Improved and sped up existing code.
We’re still struggling with unstable Bluetooth and getting access to the BCB. We are working on both though.
Please note that this release of CanZE will ask for a new permission: Internet access. We use this only to have CanZE access a WiFi gateway (or a car emulator that uses the same protocol), see Developers geek talk . Regular users will probably never use this. Internet access is not used to send any data to the Internet. We have not implemented MQTT, we are not collecting any data, nothing.