# My EV Gauge project



## frodus (Apr 12, 2008)

Do you have more build details? Is it open source or are you wanting to release a product? I'd love to build something like this for my conversion. The build quality is amazing! I can't really navigate the site (Don't speak German).

Since it's CANbus, can you customize the PID's? errors? etc? What about non OBD compliant? i.e. my inverter is canopen and doesn't have OBD coding to make it respond to PID requests over can, but all the data is available on the canbus.


I'm working on basically the same thing, except I'm using Torque (android). So far I've gotten my mbed processor to talk to torque and respond to PID requests. I was going to use the mbed as a gateway to the inverter to respond to PID requests from Torque and request data from the inverter. My BMS is already OBD compliant and that is working just fine.


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## peterguy (Jun 18, 2012)

I have no plans to make it open source or to release a product. I already thought about selling it, but I'm afraid of all the warranty stuff, and the effort of making it marketable still would be huge. The main reason why I've build the gauge is technical interest and passion in creating nice electronic devices 

The device has one pure CAN bus interface and one OBDII interface.
At the moment I use the CAN only, because it was connected to the proprietary CAN line between all the BMS.
CANopen is a protocol on top of CAN, for that I would need a CANopen software stack. But in general, all information that is comming over any CAN protocoll can be shown, however of course I have to manually code each signal 

Your way building a gateway to provide information to the Torque App is a good approch. Should be much faster to build the gateway rather than building the complete gauge!


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## Ace_bridger (Nov 22, 2011)

I think it's great and would buy one if the price was competative...if it was very competative I wouldn't give a monkey's.

Very well done and I think if it works as well as it looks then I think you should get a small number made and think about a patent or copyright?

Can you only connect it to a car which has CAN bus?

Brilliant.


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## frodus (Apr 12, 2008)

Bummer. I would love to see your project become a product.

I think I might do some tinkering with my Smartboard this winter (https://mbed.org/users/WiredHome/notebook/SmartBoard-baseboard/) and see if I can start a project that is all open source on mbed's site. That way people just add to the code, mix and match. The canopen on top of Canbus is what I'm not looking forward to! They do have a canopen stack for Mbed (http://mbed.org/users/sam_grove/notebook/canopen/) based on canfestival.


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## peterguy (Jun 18, 2012)

Ace_bridger said:


> I think it's great and would buy one if the price was competative...if it was very competative I wouldn't give a monkey's.
> 
> Very well done and I think if it works as well as it looks then I think you should get a small number made and think about a patent or copyright?


Can you give me a feeling about what would be competitive in terms of price? 



Ace_bridger said:


> Can you only connect it to a car which has CAN bus?


On the PCB, I have prepared a RS232 interface which I initially planned to use to connect a GPS antenna. 
Additionally, the OBD2 interface is not only CAN, it also supports PWM and K-Line protocol.
Some time ago I was considering a Bluetooth interface, but at that time I did not find any affordable 4.0 interface.



Ace_bridger said:


> Brilliant.


Thanks for the flowers


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## peterguy (Jun 18, 2012)

frodus said:


> Bummer. I would love to see your project become a product.
> 
> I think I might do some tinkering with my Smartboard this winter (https://mbed.org/users/WiredHome/notebook/SmartBoard-baseboard/) and see if I can start a project that is all open source on mbed's site. That way people just add to the code, mix and match. The canopen on top of Canbus is what I'm not looking forward to! They do have a canopen stack for Mbed (http://mbed.org/users/sam_grove/notebook/canopen/) based on canfestival.


Hmm if they already have a canopen stack than maybe its quite straight forward to integrate and use it. 
Of course it depends a lot on the quality of the stack. But, as I know from the similar Arduino, the provided software modules are usually quite easy to use.


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## veperformance (Aug 17, 2007)

Could you make your EV Gauge send data on the canbus in order control regular dash display that rely on the original ecu ?


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## peterguy (Jun 18, 2012)

veperformance said:


> Could you make your EV Gauge send data on the canbus in order control regular dash display that rely on the original ecu ?


Basically yes, if I have the specification about what data shall be transmitted on the CAN its possible to do that.
For an older dashbord or an aftermarket one this should be no big thing.

But (as always there is a "but"), if you think about simulating the CAN Bus of a modern car this might nearly be impossible to implement, because of the big number of proprietary protocols which the manufacturers put on top of the CAN protocol.

I've been part of a team that is developing the dashboard for the next VW Golf 7, and the CAN bus there is far too complex for a DIY project.
I don't know, maybe with american cars its a different story.

Regards,
Peter


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