I'm working on an app to pull battery status off of the car. This is very useful b/c Chevy has provided a rather lame app for performing this task. I thought it would be helpful to others to share my work and get input from the community on how best to overcome obstacles.
Code: https://github.com/drewwells/carloop/
I'm assuming you know how to get going with Particle in Carloop here. You can flash updates by calling particle flash (device name)
. Note this will perform an OTA update, you may wish to add --serial
to perform a serial upgrade. I found serial to be a pain since I had to physically plug the USB cable into the device. Eventually, I just put an ATT sim in the device with gigabytes of data allowance.
Speaking of, this code assumes you are using an AT&T sim, so there's some code in there activating that and would need to be removed if you wish to use the Particle sim.
What is working
- Ambient Temperature (this is the most common data sent via the CAN bus and has become my reliability check)
- State of Charge (percentage of battery that is charged, range goes up to ~88% and I'm not sure what the lower limit is yet)
- Fuel Tank Level Input, no idea why I'm looking at this
- Charger voltage (works with the car on or off)
- Charger amperage (works with the car on or off)
What is not working
- State of Charge is very infrequent, often updating only 1-2 per 4hour charging session. The value updates continuously while the car is on. This is true of most of the data.
- My car will report errors while particle is plugged in. I had to unplug Particle this morning to get the car to turn on. Check Engine light will turn on and off due to these errors or the radio/AC may shut off.
- GPS is broken, not sure if it's hardware or software issue
- Higher level functionality is missing. Ideally, the raw data would be processed for more useful functionality like what time will my car be charged. Current (max SOC - current SOC) / charger amp / charger volt would give the time to max charge.
The project is a branch off the extremely helpful starter guide on hackster.io https://www.hackster.io/egarl004/visualize-car-data-with-carloop-and-blynk-49c991 . All credits go to Emerson for getting this far! Also credits to the gm-volt community for collecting PIDs for the car https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HgWCnosdRqZYoWHEl7ylAxjxv4UFVeisWiR7gcr8H6I/edit#gid=0