RavCharge, a solution to charge timer and entune woes

[fooljoe]

fooljoe, I think I followed you home for about 15 miles this evening unless there is someone else with a RAVCharge.com sticker on their rear window . I appreciate your efficient driving style

Haha, I thought those were Rav4-EV headlights behind me! Now to get some Ravvers who aren't already signed up for RavCharge to notice my new sticker...

By the way, I've got 3 more of them that my wife had printed if anybody wants to give me some free advertising space. Sticker looks just like the logo in the header bar, with a clear background - first come, first served.

 

[fooljoe]

FYI - RavCharge is having an outage today. I expect to get it resolved and up and running before everybody's charge timers go off tonight, but just in case make sure your car's timer is set appropriately to charge tonight.

 

[waidy]

FYI - RavCharge is having an outage today. I expect to get it resolved and up and running before everybody's charge timers go off tonight, but just in case make sure your car's timer is set appropriately to charge tonight.

No problem, I am on a outage of Rav4EV as well. My Rav is at the dealer for a cabin heater fix and won't be back until next year (2nd week of January, 2014).

 

[fooljoe]

Site's back up and running - server just needed a reboot after a couple months of continuous duty. When in doubt, always reboot, right? :lol:

Sorry about the heater outage Waidy! Not the best time for that. I hope they set you up with an EV loaner.

 

[waidy]

Site's back up and running - server just needed a reboot after a couple months of continuous duty. When in doubt, always reboot, right? :lol:

Sorry about the heater outage Waidy! Not the best time for that. I hope they set you up with an EV loaner.

Do you have SparkCharge? They are getting me a Spark.

 

[fooljoe]

Do you have SparkCharge? They are getting me a Spark.

Haha, well if what I hear about the Volt's timer is any indication GM did a much better job with their software than Toyota, so you should be ok. Glad they're at least getting you some kind of EV instead of the Corolla they stuck me with when it took them a whole weekend to figure out how to apply a software update.

 

[waidy]

Do you have SparkCharge? They are getting me a Spark.

Haha, well if what I hear about the Volt's timer is any indication GM did a much better job with their software than Toyota, so you should be ok. Glad they're at least getting you some kind of EV instead of the Corolla they stuck me with when it took them a whole weekend to figure out how to apply a software update.

That's because I insisted. It took them two days to find a loaner EV for me (good that I have two other EVs). I told them I don't use any fossil, my house has no gas, for example. I told them if there is not a loaner EV they have to put my Rav back to the state when I took it in. I rather drive in a no-cabin-heat EV than a cabin-heat gasoline car.

So I just came back with this 2014 SparkEV. It has the SAE combo socket but the L2 charge rate is only 3.3kW. I am glad it's only for one month. I am happy as long as I don't need to use gas.

 

[TonyWilliams]

By the way, I've got 3 more of them that my wife had printed if anybody wants to give me some free advertising space. Sticker looks just like the logo in the header bar, with a clear background - first come, first served.

I'll put one on my car.

Tony Williams
12656 Sabre View Cove
San Diego, CA 92128

 

[fooljoe]

Thanks Tony! I'll ship it out soon.

 

[jrustin22]

Thanks Tony! I'll ship it out soon.

If you still have one available, I'll put one on my car too

 

[fooljoe]

Ok all 3 stickers are now spoken for, but if there's any additional interest let me know and we might get some more printed. Thanks everybody!

 

[sminx]

Can RavCharge adjust the charging speed down to 30amps?

 

[fooljoe]

Can RavCharge adjust the charging speed down to 30amps?

No, unfortunately the car offers no interface to change charging speed, neither through the dash nor Entune (which RavCharge uses.) The only way to set charging speed is through the EVSE - it generates the pilot signal that tells the car the amperage available, and the car then uses as much as it can up to that limit. By altering the voltage and amperage sliders in RavCharge, you can determine how long your charge will take to complete at a given speed.

 

[rav4buyer]

was RavCharge down last night? I woke up and my car hadn't charged. Wondering if it was RavCharge or my car. First time in five months using. I am only using RavCharge with no e-mails from Entunes.

Thanks

 

[fooljoe]

was RavCharge down last night?

I didn't see any indication of an outage until this report (at least my car charged as usual.) I'll look into it tonight to see if it was just an oddity with your car or perhaps an Entune outage. Thanks for letting me know.

 

[TonyWilliams]

How do I run two cars on this? Can you make a button to switch between Entunes logins?

 

[Akr]

was RavCharge down last night?

I didn't see any indication of an outage until this report (at least my car charged as usual.) I'll look into it tonight to see if it was just an oddity with your car or perhaps an Entune outage. Thanks for letting me know.

Mine didn't charge last night either. I have to kick off charging manually for 1 hr and then head to work.

 

[fooljoe]

How do I run two cars on this? Can you make a button to switch between Entunes logins?

For now two cars are treated as two separate accounts under RavCharge. You can set up each car with its own email address, or if you have them both under the same email address in Entune, I'll set the second one up as "[email protected]", and then you can login to each separately. I agree that a button or menu option to switch between cars quickly would be nice, but unfortunately doing so isn't quite so easy as it sounds (but it's still on my to-do list.) Setting up the 2nd one will probably take a little manual intervention on my part, so just let me know if you want to set a 2nd one up and what its VIN is.

Mine didn't charge last night either. I have to kick off charging manually for 1 hr and then head to work.

I went through the logs and did confirm that a number of cars were not responding to Entune commands from about 11-12 last night (timers set after about 12:10 all worked fine.) RavCharge was operating nominally, and sent the start charge commands to Entune 10 separate times per car, but Entune was having some sort of outage at that time which was preventing it from communicating with the cars.

I'm sorry for the inconvenience - unfortunately RavCharge is at the mercy of Entune. As a fall back, I recommend leaving your car's timer set a few hours later than the time you actually want the charge to complete. With a little trial and error you can usually set the car's timer late enough so that it won't fire off too early, but early enough so that if RavCharge or Entune don't work the car's timer can still kick in. If you let me know details of what power EVSE you have at home and how low of an SOC you typically have I can assist you in calculating a good time to set the car's timer to.

 

[Akr]

Mine didn't charge last night either. I have to kick off charging manually for 1 hr and then head to work.

I went through the logs and did confirm that a number of cars were not responding to Entune commands from about 11-12 last night (timers set after about 12:10 all worked fine.) RavCharge was operating nominally, and sent the start charge commands to Entune 10 separate times per car, but Entune was having some sort of outage at that time which was preventing it from communicating with the cars.

I'm sorry for the inconvenience - unfortunately RavCharge is at the mercy of Entune. As a fall back, I recommend leaving your car's timer set a few hours later than the time you actually want the charge to complete. With a little trial and error you can usually set the car's timer late enough so that it won't fire off too early, but early enough so that if RavCharge or Entune don't work the car's timer can still kick in. If you let me know details of what power EVSE you have at home and how low of an SOC you typically have I can assist you in calculating a good time to set the car's timer to.

Thanks for looking into it. It worked last night. I have also setup a backup timer in ravcharge for 3am if first one fails. The car's scheduler has been unpredictable few times.

 

[fooljoe]

So I just noticed that something about this morning's time change caused my mailer script to send out a ton of emails to some people. Sorry!