Has anybody else signed on lately? There's just under 2 weeks left, and they're only at ~$8500 out of $25k. Any ideas on how to draw more attention to it?
Thanks again for the continued support John! We're at 40% and over 10k now, and there are still 19 days left (I believe we might also have the option to extend a few days). There's still a long way to go though, so let me know if there's anything I can do to help you support the project. We're also working super hard to make sure we reach that goal.
Just noticed this, and the ******** comparison including OVMS (and others). I'd laugh if it wasn't so deceitful. Comparing a cellular logger against bluetooth, and giving a negative red cross to the cellular loggers for cellular fees is just wrong.
To be clear: you have to be physically next to, or in, the car in order to download your trip data. No alerting if charge is interrupted. No remote lock/unlock. No GPS position. No remote valet on/off. No charge status. No ... well, not much at all apart from the ******** that is MPGe, basic SOC%, and charge time histogram. As for 'battery health' - no technical information on how they get that, and it wouldn't surprise me if it was something ******** like percentage time spent at high/low SOC, or drop in maximum SOC seen - certainly not the detailed technical info (cell voltages, CAC, etc) that is harder to get at.
Sorry, but this one doesn't do it for me. And with all the social features they have a total of 73 backers after 4 weeks.
Update: Matt has graciously removed OVMS from the comparison chart, and responded very quickly.
To be clear: the reason I don't think this product should be compared to OVMS is because OVMS is not a logger (the primary purpose of OVMS is to allow you to remotely check the status of your car and be alerted to problems).
I'm only vaguely familiar with OVMS, but it sounds like you're right, that it's not a good/fair comparison. Obviously in the case of the Model S, remote monitoring is already covered thanks to Tesla's own iOS/Android apps.
I agree it'd be nice if we could know a little more about how the myEV system calculates battery health, or what data exactly will be available on specific vehicles, but it's a bit of a chicken/egg situation, where they can't finalize everything without the funding, so I guess there's a bit of a leap of faith involved in any of these crowdfunding concepts.
Also, to touch on your comment about being in/near the car, it's true that you have to be there for the initial data transfer, but to be clear, you don't always have to be nearby in order to have functionality. In an e-mail conversation with Sunny, he explained that the data is transmitted to your phone via bluetooth at the end of each trip, then uploaded to their servers via your phone's data connection, so when you access the app, it's pulling that archived data from their servers.
Yes, that sounds correct, but it would mean that we are dependent on them continuing to supply the cloud services for free. Without the cloud, is it a brick?
The issue is if you don't have your phone with you, or the iOS App is not in the background, or if it is your wife driving the car, then the logs are not available until you (or your phone) gets back into/near the car and syncs.
I am not saying it is a bad design, or bad arrangement at all. I am just seeking clarity in how this works.
Just to reiterate a lot of what Matt said in his email:
We definitely didn't mean to pick a fight, as we're actually big fans of OVMS. The only reason we put up a comparison and had OVMS is because backers asked us to put it up so people could understand the differences. I made the chart to highlight the benefits of the MyCarma myEV contrasted against other loggers, and I didn't intend it to be an absolute comparison. Cellular loggers have their own distinct functionality & benefits as you mentioned, and it's my fault for not making that painfully clear. I've added a note to the chart regarding this, but we are in the process of reworking it to give a more holistic view.
We've intentionally left out a lot of the technical information because we're trying to target myEV to the more mainstream EV owner that wants the cleaned/summarized data instead of the raw stream. It is easy to see why this could cause some skepticism though.
While the signals vary by vehicle, we try and get battery voltage, current, SOC, temp, vehicle state, and vehicle speed. Some of the vehicles we don't get all of those, and some we're able to get a lot more. For battery health, we use a combination of historical data, technical information from the battery, and an advanced algorithm. All the data from our loggers comes back to our servers, which is how we can feed results to the phone that would be too computationally intensive to do locally. For data/vehicles we have the right to aggregate we actually post high-level results -
here are over 15,000 trips for the 2012 LEAF. And Matt's background is in battery health, who actually spent four years in grad school doing little other than beating up batteries to see how they degrade and how that can be measured. We've tweaked/tune the algorithm over the past 5 years, but the core structure is still similar to that from his thesis. The algorithm is better for vehicles that we more data for - fortunately we've got a really good database for the common vehicles. For the others it will start ok and will improve as the database grows.
With regards to the cloud, it is necessary for the app to function. As I mentioned before, the process is too resource intensive to occur right on the phone. A growing number of applications these days rely heavily on communicating with the cloud. We're doing this at a much larger scale for commercial fleets, so there is reason to trust that there will be stability with our system.
Your 2nd point is also true; logs won't be available if there isn't a phone in the car connected to the logger through bluetooth. Your wife could technically log into your account on her phone, if you so insist. We realize this is probably less than ideal, but given that this is a new project, and the fact that we're trying to keep costs down in order to appeal to the consumer market, we must make certain reservations (for now), as I'm sure you understand.
We will be coming out with a short technical FAQ video within the next week, in order to address some of the questions. If anyone has any in particular, please let me know.
Again, we didn't mean to stir a commotion, and have tried our best to hopefully resolve all your immediate concerns.
Thanks!
Sunny
