There was a time when all you needed to use your car was a key. In older cars it was a classic steel key, in newer cars it was a type of RFID chip for immobilizer. But as cars have more and more computers on wheels, the key has disappeared in favor of an electronic key that uses RF and, in many cases, a smartphone app. It’s even used as a promotional point: “Look how fantastic our car is, you open it with an app!”
Now, the apparent flaw is starting to show up in this strategy, as the application will be withdrawn for Nissan Leafs manufactured before 2016 and on the road in the UK. The automaker is talking about retiring 2G services, but it turns out to be a bit suspicious if you think that the old networks will continue to exist in one form or another until 2030.
Frankly, there is a part of us that welcomes this news. For one, it affects relatively few early adopters. But at the same time, it holds the promise of nonetheless educating a gullible public that even if a car can last into its time or third decade, the superfluous generation that has been supplied to it probably won’t. If consumers are asking for longer or better-built vehicles, this can only be a smart thing to do. We suspect that stories like this will become more and more unusual in the coming years; fortunately for Leaf owners, its relatively negligible loss of capacity is arguably not the worst of them.
If automakers have forgotten how to make a slag-free vehicle, we love to remind you.
Header: Kārlis Dambrāns, CC BY 2. 0.
Thank you [CampGareth] for the tip.
Meet [Daniel Öster]. [Daniel] is a self-proclaimed oil company. In other words, he’s a hot rodder who can’t be left alone enough. Just because he drives a 2012 Nissan Leaf doesn’t mean he doesn’t need a little more pizzazz. Having already upgraded the battery, [Daniel] focused on improving the 80kW Inverter. Not only was [Daniel] successful, but the work was documented and open sourced on GitHub. Part of [Daniel’s] project is to open closed ecosystems in a different way and make electric vehicles hacked and repaired. available to mere mortals.
To get an additional 50 hp, [Daniel] may have simply changed the 110 kW transmission of a 2018 or newer Leaf, but a less expensive direction was chosen from changing only the 110 kW inverter. By replacing only the inverter, the amendment becomes more affordable for others. [Daniel] expertly documents how the new 110 kW drive fits into the existing motor by setting a resolution correction price on the drive.
Cutting the wiring harness of a vehicle you’re still paying for is an exercise reserved for the most committed modders, but a connector replacement between 2012 and 2018 made it necessary. The only equipment needed was a wire cutter, a soldering iron, a shrink heat, and some liquid courage.
Although the trick was successful, no functionality improvements were initially achieved, as the CAN bus signal sent to the inverter never asked it to deliver more than the original 80 kW. A man-in-the-middle attack on the CAN bus was carried out by adding a CAN bridge, a device that listens to the traffic on the CAN bus and bends it to [Daniel’s] will. By multiplying the KW sign by 1. 3, the 80 KW sign becomes 110 KW, and the ridiculous full speed is reached!There are some perfect gains in 0-100 km/h strokes, however [Daniel] rarely does. Your next trick will be to install a 160 kW inverter to pedal even crazier.
Be sure to watch the introductory video during the break. You’ll also be interested in the Nissan Leaf tricks we featured earlier, such as modernizing a fast-charging port, recovering batteries from accidents, and partially resolving serious charging failures.
Continue “Open Source Hot Rod Mod Brings More Power to EV Owners” →
Electric cars have been around for some time and that’s why they’re starting to be cut and modified like any other car. [Daniel Öster] is one of the other people doing the paints and recently posted his efforts to modernize fast charging on a base-style Nissan Leaf that didn’t come with that feature.
The switch required the replacement of the electrical distribution unit and the installation of the CHAdeMO port on the front of the car. The vehicle module (VCM) also had to be opened to route a wire to a relay to turn on the rapid. Charging subsystem. Finally, the cables had to be spliced together to make everything work well between the car and the fast charger.
[Daniel] benefited from the forum’s quality resources and a Nissan Leaf that already referenced CHAdeMO, which helped a lot. In the end, the fast charger worked the first time, much to [Daniel’s] relief. We have also featured his paintings before. Video after the break.
Continue “Fast charging upgrade on a Nissan Leaf EV” →
Electric cars are becoming more and more common on the road, but when they are parked in the driveway or garage, there are still some problems to solve when it comes to charging them. Of course, there are many charging stations on the market, but they all have other features, capacities, and even ports. Therefore, to ensure that full control over the speed of a car’s batteries is maintained, it would possibly be necessary to access the spare parts bin and pull out a reliable Arduino.
This task comes to us from [Sebastian] who needed this point to qualify his Leaf, and also has the skills to implement it, from the gigantic high-voltage switching contactors to the software that runs his network connectivity and his internet application. The charging station also has all the features available. You can instruct the car to charge at other rates and restrict it to charging at other times (if energy is less expensive at night, for example). It is capable of tracking the car’s prestige charge and other data through the vehicle’s communication bus, and it even has a front-end internet app to monitor the device.
The task is based on an Arduino Nano 33 IoT with all the code available on the task’s GitHub page. Although we advise you to exercise extreme caution when it comes to mains voltage and when interacting with an expensive item like an electric vehicle, at first glance, it turns out that the build has crossed all your requirements and may even be a smart prototype for a production unit in the future. If you don’t want all the features of this charging station, you can hack the car to charge more. Complex loading functions.
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One of the benefits of owning an electric vehicle is said to be reduced maintenance costs, and that’s largely true, that is, until the vehicle’s battery starts to age. You may then have to pay a fixed bill comparable to replacing the engine of your old fuel burner. Depending on the age of the vehicle at the time, you may find yourself looking for a new vehicle.
But in his most recent video, [Daniel Öster] proves that you can upgrade the battery of a modern electric vehicle without having to spend a lot of money. While it’s not exactly a simple task, he manages to change the package of his 2012 Nissan LEAF in the comfort of his own garage, not unusual equipment and with the vehicle on jack stands. The old battery wasn’t completely destroyed, so he was even able to recoup some of its prices by promoting it; bringing the total value of the transaction to approximately €2,122 (€2,500 US).
While it wouldn’t be a bad deal, even for an undeniable exchange, the operation was an upgrade. The car was originally sold with a 24 kWh battery, however, [Daniel] replaced it with a 30 kWh pack for the 2017 LEAF. Your car now has a longer diversity than the day it rolled off the assembly line, although, unsurprisingly, the installation was more complex than it would have been with a new battery.
[Daniel] produced a kit that contains all the adapters needed to perform your own battery upgrade, adding a module that translates the battery’s diagnostic signals to anything the older vehicle can understand. With all the electrical elements simplified, all you have to worry about is drilling the new battery mounting holes into the frame.
The battery is, in fact, the center and soul of an electric car, so it’s no surprise that mechanics and hackers want to be as informed about it as possible. it will only move forward with time.
Continue reading “Battery Gives New Life to Nissan LEAF” →
Batteries wear out. If you are an electric vehicle enthusiast, surely in the not-too-distant future there will come a time when your vehicle’s batteries have reached the end of their useful life and need to be replaced. If you have purchased a new electric vehicle, there is a good chance of contracting a lease with the manufacturer, who will take care of the replacement; However, if you own an older vehicle, it can be costly.
Fortunately, there is a tempting solution. While an increasing number of top-brand electric cars are popping up on our roads, a corresponding number of them have hit the scrap steel market as a result of accidental damage. So, it’s not about getting a relatively new lithium-ion vehicle. A modern electric vehicle battery at a price that is particularly lower than what you would pay for new cells. But, as always, there’s a problem. These packages are designed solely for the cars that accompany them and have proprietary connectors and protocols with which they communicate with their host vehicle. Therefore, installing them in some other car is not a task for the faint of heart.
The reader of La-Tecnologia [Wolf] owns an electric truck, a Solectria E10. It has a set of old lead-acid batteries and would get immense advantages from an upgrade to lithium-ion. He salvaged a battery from a 2013 Nissan Leaf electric car and pledged to design his battery control formula (BMS) opposite. The Solectria will use a different battery setup than the Leaf. So while you need to use the Leaf’s BMS, you had to design your protocols in the opposite way in order to upgrade your Nissan. microcontroller with one of its own.
His description of the opposite engineering procedure is long and detailed and, with its numerous images and videos, readable. It uses clever techniques, such as creating its own hardware simulation of a Li-ion mobile so that it can supply the known values of the BMS that it can then stumble upon from the serial knowledge stream.
We cover some EV batteries here at The-Tech. More recently, we even covered other truck conversions that employ Leaf batteries, and last year we introduced a Leaf battery teardown. However, we are not limited to Nissan, for example, a similar procedure is shown here with a Tesla Model S package.
[Jay] got a really smart deal with a low mileage Nissan Leaf battery. Unfortunately, he arrived packed in a crashed Nissan Leaf. There are more electric cars on the roads every year, which means more and more cars are going off the road due to accidents. Electric cars are designed in particular to protect their batteries. So, as we’ve already noted with Tesla vehicles, a rescue car comprises a working battery. [Jay] has used this wisdom to his credit and walks us through his experience purchasing, testing, and disassembling Leaf, his own reclaimed Blade.
[Jay] opened an account on Copart, an auction site for salvaged vehicles here in the United States. “Live” online auto auctions tend to work a bit more than E-bay, so [Jay] walks us through the car. purchase procedure and provides some tips on how to get through the procedure. [Jay’s] passenger car was delivered to him in a trailer. The rear was so hard that the rear tires were unusable. The car also had dead electricity. Fortunately, the electrical disturbances turned out to be a depleted 12-volt accessory battery. A quick charge of the accessory battery brought the Leaf to life and showed a ton of problematic codes. [Jay] erased the codes with his trusty OBD II scanner, and the car was drivable, at least as much as a crashed car can drive. However, it moved under its own power, with the rear attached to cars.
Now that it was known that the battery was in good shape, [Jay] set out to release it from its crushed leaf cocoon. Nissan’s service manual assumes that this would be done with an elevator. [Jay] had no such luxuries in his driveway, so he used Three Cats on the Ground to lower the six-hundred-pound battery and carts to get it out from under the car.
Click after to see the rest of the story.
Continue “[Jay] turns the page and marks the drums” →