RavCharge, a solution to charge timer and entune woes

[rav4buyer]

Not sure if someone has mentioned this but what about PG&E EV-A customization.

If car is plugged in and it's off-peak hours, it charges automatically. This way you are maximizing charge without even thinking about it without touching timers ever. If you drive and come home after 11PM it starts immediately. At 7PM on Saturday it starts immediately. Can look into what holidays they use and integrate that too.


Just a thought!
Love the app so far, works like a charm.

[Dsinned]

Joe, I can live with it. Because I generally only do scheduled charging on weekends after midnight, I will only get one set of those "failed to charge . . . unplugged" email notifications per week (either Saturday or Sunday). If I used the Timer to schedule a charge every night, then it might become more of a nuissance.

Maybe you can put a toggle in RavCharge or a check box that makes scheduled charges conditional on whether Entunes thinks the car is plugged in or not. If not, again, I think most of us can live with the notifications that don't really matter.

Thanks again for taking the initiative to come up such a useful resource as RavCharge and please keep up the good work!

[waidy]

Sorry, I've been out of country back packing for last last couple of months. I am back in Hong Kong catching up emails and threads. Would some one tell me how you could plug in the Rav4 and tells it not to charge and wait for RavCharge's command?

[fooljoe]

Sorry, I've been out of country back packing for last last couple of months. I am back in Hong Kong catching up emails and threads. Would some one tell me how you could plug in the Rav4 and tells it not to charge and wait for RavCharge's command?

Leave the in-car departure timer set, a few hours later than you actually want it to complete. If you unset the car's timer then there's no way to prevent it from going into "charge immediately" mode.

Besides, it's a good idea to leave both on just so you can be doubly sure the charge will happen. If it's a 31st day or you've used 120, RavCharge will take care of you. If entune's servers go down, the car might take care of you.

[waidy]

Sorry, I've been out of country back packing for last last couple of months. I am back in Hong Kong catching up emails and threads. Would some one tell me how you could plug in the Rav4 and tells it not to charge and wait for RavCharge's command?

Leave the in-car departure timer set, a few hours later than you actually want it to complete. If you unset the car's timer then there's no way to prevent it from going into "charge immediately" mode.

Besides, it's a good idea to leave both on just so you can be doubly sure the charge will happen. If it's a 31st day or you've used 120, RavCharge will take care of you. If entune's servers go down, the car might take care of you.

Thanks for the speedy respond. Here's another question: If the Rav is at 10% SOC and standard charge (80%) is set, the charge time undoubtedly will be more than couple of hours (even at full speed 240V*40Amp). What would happen if the departure time is set to two hours after the RavCharge's start time? In another word, does the Rav takes both commands (from the Rav and from RavCharge)?

[Dsinned]

I'll try to answer that . . . in that situation, I think all that would happen is the car will continue to charge because the "second" start command (from the car) will be redundant, because the car is already being charged.

Joe, please correct me if I am mistaken.

[waidy]

I'll try to answer that . . . in that situation, I think all that would happen is the car will continue to charge because the "second" start command (from the car) will be redundant, because the car is already being charged.

Joe, please correct me if I am mistaken.

Since I have been traveling I have not seen my Rav for several months. What would be a good feature is to allow the Rav to listen to both commands if one only want to charge to 50% SOC (or any SOC != 80% && != 100% ). Of course, this feature is only useful if departure time can be set via RavCharge.

My Rav does do the liquid battery cool sequence so it will discharge faster than those that do not do liquid cool while sitting in the garage. Therefore, having been able to do start-time and end-time charging via RavCharge would be good. But of course, we will need to see whether the Rav would listen to both commands.

[yblaser]

What would be a good feature is to allow the Rav to listen to both commands if one only want to charge to 50% SOC (or any SOC != 80% && != 100% ). Of course, this feature is only useful if departure time can be set via RavCharge.

I would hazard a guess that while technically possible, it is probably not practical. If you told RavCharge what you had set the departure times in the car to be as well as what power EVSE you were hooked up to it could calculate what the approximate charge start time is taking into account the car's normal overestimation of charge time. It could then check to see if the car is charging around that time and send a stop charge command (I'm guessing that exists).

The problem with this solution and solutions to some other requests in this thread is that it may require lots of queries to Entune to determine when the car is charging or for whatever information is required. I think at some point this web app could attract the attention of Toyota if there is enough traffic from the RavCharge server. I believe something similar happened with Chevy and OnStar but I think things got worked out in the end (based on the popularity of the third party service) although I am not hopeful Toyota would be as accommodating.

[fooljoe]

Thanks for the speedy respond. Here's another question: If the Rav is at 10% SOC and standard charge (80%) is set, the charge time undoubtedly will be more than couple of hours (even at full speed 240V*40Amp). What would happen if the departure time is set to two hours after the RavCharge's start time? In another word, does the Rav takes both commands (from the Rav and from RavCharge)?

Dsinned and yblaser's comments are correct. RavCharge commands are indistinguishable from the "charge now" commands you would send from Toyota's Entune app. The car knows nothing about RavCharge's timers, it just gets a "charge now" command at a time that you set.

Therefore, if the car's onboard timer is set to start before your RavCharge timer, then it will. The RavCharge timer will still go through as programmed, but it will be ignored by the car and charging will continue. You'll probably get a couple extra emails from Entune though.

Since I have been traveling I have not seen my Rav for several months. What would be a good feature is to allow the Rav to listen to both commands if one only want to charge to 50% SOC (or any SOC != 80% && != 100% ). Of course, this feature is only useful if departure time can be set via RavCharge.

Charging to a user-specified SOC would be great, but there's no "stop charging" command available that would facilitate such a thing. It would be possible to notify you once a given SOC target is hit so you could unplug the car yourself, but that could lead to the problem yblaser describes of having to send a lot of queries to Entune. Still, I am considering adding a "charge monitor" feature that will query the vehicle every xx minutes while charging and could send such notifications.

Also, you mentioned setting a departure timer via RavCharge, and this is something I've also thought a lot about. I don't think it would be as simple as it might seem, however, since unlike the car's timer RavCharge doesn't know when you plug in or unplug and go somewhere. It'd have to query the car periodically to ascertain such things, and again too much of that might be problematic. But it's still on my laundry list of future improvements!

Speaking of which, I just got done with making a bunch of improvements to the code to improve reliability, most of which shouldn't be visible to users. But as always, if you notice anything strange please let me know! One new feature is that RavCharge is now capable of supporting multiple vehicles under the same Entune account. To use this feature you would login as usual with your Entune credentials, then to access the 2nd (or nth) vehicle you log out then log back in with ".2" (or ".n") appended to the end of your email address. For example, if your Entune email is ravcharge@gmail.com, that account would work as usual for your first vehicle, and ravcharge@gmail.com.2 would work for the 2nd one.

So go out and buy that 2nd or 3rd Rav you've always wanted!

[vips]

Joe,
Thanks for the RaVcharge site and features.
Any reason why the first e-mail is a failure?
Then 2 success e-mail within 2-5 minutes.
The 20 minute fail safe charge command and e-mail, I understand.

-Vips