By Posted on Posted in Builds No Comments

Long time no see.

Given that CanZE does not support the Ph2 cars, I am pleasantly surprised to see uptake still grow albeit more slowly. The last year saw an average growth of 22.5% or roughly 1.7% per month. It makes sense I guess as the pool of “Ph1” cars is now (very) slowly going down, but the technically inclined or more daring number of drivers is probably going a bit up.

Speaking of daring, this brings me to my second point. Somehow the “Force crash” option, only there to test Google Crashlytics behavior, made it in production by mistake. While there is a warning, it seems everybody wants have a go at it at least once: in the last 30 days, it was done 123 times by 77 users, go figure! Pretty daring indeed because who knows, maybe it would have crashed the car 😉 Anyway, it has affected crash statistics pretty badly and we’re way over what Google deems “bad behavior”. However, if I take that cause out, it’s down 85%. I am not going to do a new release over this one, but if you can resist, it’s appreciated.

Stay healthy, stay safe.

By Posted on Posted in ZOE No Comments
Set point current (A)Power battery (W) *)Power AC (W)Current AC (A)Power efficiency (%)
32196042150731.5291.2
28170741868127.4091.4
24147141608023.5991.5
20120221306019.26 **)92.1
1692311012015.5692.2
136970781012.8089.2
10444851209.5186.9

*) Battery power (DC) was derived from CanZE, voltage times current **) There was an obvious typo in the data I received for this value, 19.26 is most probably the correct value but I must note this could be wrong.

I must say I am mightily impressed by these figures, especially the dynamic range of the efficiency. I hope this puts to rest the “inefficient” fairy tales. Very clever engineering for sure.

By Posted on Posted in ZOE

A lot has been written, assumed, wrongly (and rightly) measured and interpreted about the efficiency of the charger. The biggest problem has always been that the big capacitors in the the charger filter section create a fairly large phase shift (phi) so real power is not the same as RMS voltage times current. This is not inefficiency. It’s, at most, ineffectiveness.

I have been in contact with an Italian professor in Power Electronics and he has put an R110 on some serious lab equipment. The results are as follows

Set point current (A)Power battery (W) *)Power AC (W)Current AC (A)Power efficiency (%)
326043707031.685.5
285325630028.184.5
244366523023.483.5
203543427019.681.1
162840356016.280.7
131881254011.874.1
10134119409.369.0

*) Battery power (DC) was derived from CanZE, voltage times current

Conclusion: If charging at a 16A setpoint (single phase), the efficiency is only a few percents lower than the highest measured. 85.5% is nothing to write home about but not bad. 80.7% at 16A is surely not as bad as some people would like you to believe.

I hope to get my hands on some 3 phase measurement. There is reason to believe the efficiency could be better, as there is a lot less curve following to do.

By Posted on Posted in ZOE No Comments

Note: I drafted this post in February and somehow never published it.

Github user SMCinc posted his research on ZOE’s TPMS system in CanZE’s issue tracker.

The proper TPMS sensors can be coaxed to transmit their ID using 125 kHz activation tool. Those tools are cheaper than a decent dongle. Search for “EL 50448”.

The transmission of the sensor can be received by a cheap DVB-T USB Stick with RTL2832 chipset and the rtl_433 software from Github and a Zadig driver (latter only if on Windows). It runs fine on a Raspberry Pi.

rtl_433 -f 434000000 -R 123

Here is example output

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/55346351/74090534-b2093680-4aac-11ea-9261-9887df32b3a6.png

The ID of the the sensor here is A3FFDAD which should be entered in CanZE as

By Posted on Posted in Hardware 10 Comments

The CanSee dongle firmware has been updated to handle 29 bit requests properly. This version (004) is required if you intent to use CanSee with the new ZE50, please update the firmware. If you have modified the software you need to merge the changes. If you do not intent to use your CanSee dongle with a ZE50, there is no need to update.

By Posted on Posted in News 6 Comments
  1. 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.
  2. Guess what I have on my driveway now on loan for a full week. Watch this space……..
  3. 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?

By Posted on Posted in Builds 18 Comments

This morning I received a message from user @Minibiti reporting success on the ZE50 test code. This indicates our route to enabling CanZE for the ZE50 is probably solid. In aeronautical terms: the test flight was a success and we will now open up the envelope. Apart from a very small change that needs to be tested, it could be mostly boring table conversion work. Thank you Minibiti!

By Posted on Posted in Builds 7 Comments

Minutes ago, I released a new beta. It contains, next to the usual array of small fixes, very limited proof-of-concept test-code for the ZE50. Select ZE50 in settings, ensure ISOTP fields is on, return to main, swipe to experimental and tap ZE50. Under the 4 meaningless lines it just might display the accelerator pedal position in %.

Please note that substantial changes in several places had to be made to make this work, and I do not have a ZE50 at my disposal to test. In other words, this is completely testing in the blind and anyone who has ever made any software knows where that leads to.

I’d appreciate feedback of course, if anything with debug files etc.

The good news is that as soon as this works, getting the current functionality of CanZE migrated to the ZE50 is straightforward.