275: Saturday 15th November 2014

The last couple of evenings I have spent a few hours exploring the touch screen functions of the screen I am using for the battery monitoring. It was reasonably easy to set up as an intelligent display. The 4D workshop tool set contains widgets that can be designed on a WYSIWYG screen then the object code can be generated and pasted into the main code at the cursor from a single button click. I have added large digits to the display for showing the voltage of one battery. The touch screen functions are really simple to use.

 

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In Spectrum Mode:

• 10 bar spectrum display shows the 10 battery voltages
• 1 bar display for total voltage ( divided by ten to use the same scale )
• 3 digit display shows the total voltage
• Touch the spectrum on the screen to access the Single Battery Mode

In Single Battery Mode:

• Large 3 digit display shows an individual battery voltage
• 1 bar display for total voltage ( divided by ten to use the same scale )
• 3 digit display shows the total voltage
• 3 digit display shows the battery number on the bottom right of the screen
• Touch to the left of the large digits to reduce the battery number
• Touch to the right of the large digits to increase the battery number
• Touch the bar display on the left to access the Spectrum Mode

In the video I touched the left of the screen whilst saying "touch the right of the screen", oops. Simple mistake!

274: Sunday 9th November 2014

I received an email from a guy called Christopher Allen who was promoting an electric car price guide that he wants to get onto every USA newsstand. Please visit the link and donate of possible, but please spread the word. See notes below from the email from Chris...:

"I believe that having a comprehensive guide to EVs on the newsstand right next to all the other automotive titles is crucial to creating demand for EVs. The problem is, as Car and Driver pointed out in the current issue, "...at present, no carmaker (other than Tesla) wants to sell one more electric than it absolutely has to.""


"So we've launched a Kickstarter campaign to get the 2015 EV Buyers Guide on 1,000 more newsstands so that more people can get the whole story about the new low cost of zero emission driving. The project is at:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/electric-car-insider/electric-car-insider-magazine-2015-ev-buyers-guide

If you'd be willing to support the campaign, tell a friend, or even just post a note about it on one of your social media sites, it would be deeply appreciated."

"We'll be hosting another Electric Car Guest Drive in April. We'll have at least three new EVs in the club: the BMW i3, Chevy Volt and - cross your fingers it comes out in time - the Audi A3 e-tron. I'll be happy to send you a complimentary invitation if you'd like. Hope to see you there."

....end of message from Chris...!

Please support this drive by re-posting and donations. Thanks....James Killick.

273: Wednesday 5th November 2014

Since the last time I posted on here I had a number of problems with the display flickering. I checked all the supplies and the earth connections but could find no fault. Eventually the display just died. I took it to my friend Ray who put it under his magnifier and found I had cracked it. I bought a new display and based on the experience I had, changes were made to make it a little easier to read. I mounted the new display to the crash pad in stead of the dash panel, so there is no physical connection to the cover. I shall add more functionality that will use the touch screen to select a single battery to monitor in future, so a good solid fixing will hopefully stop any future cracking of screens.

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I took the overall Voltage bar over to the left so it sits on its own. When it was on the right it was blending in to the other bars. I also added the LED displays at the bottom. The left LED is the overall Voltage, the right is Amps. The Amps will only show 800 as there is no connection to any current sensor at this time. I went for a drive and found it much easier to read the display now and the Voltage LED display was following the Voltage reading from the motor controller tester function. Only problem was at random interval the bars went high or low, so I suspect the measure boards are doing something weird. It would be no surprise as this is version 1.0 still.