Cycle Analyst V3 preview and first beta release

Just got back from my first ride on the b15 code. Still working nicely in current-throttle mode, but I do have one new bug to report:

When I got home and reviewed the data from the trip, the main screen told me that I'd ridden 11.4 miles (which is correct) and consumed 4.45 Ah (which is probably correct, based on past experience), however a few screens over it claimed that I'd achieved an efficiency of 13.8 watt-hours per mile. Given that I have a 52v LiFe battery, this is wrong. (Normally, the displayed wh/mile value matches a manual computation [Ah / miles * 51] and produces a value of around 20-23 depending on terrain and rider effort.)

I did verify that the realtime voltage display indicated normally both at rest and while under load, so I know that the CA is still reading voltage correctly.

I've also noted another odd phenomenon, which I believe is new in b15.

Each time I power up the system, the odometer on the main screen increments by approximately 0.16 miles:

[youtube]cr1uoLxaMhY[/youtube]

You can see in the video that each time I switch it off and then on again, it increments from the previous position at the last shutoff, and yet the bike isn't moving at all. I am using a reed sensor with a single magnet on the front wheel, so 1 pulse per rev.

Funny you shoudl post that just now. On my older V2.x LSCADP, I have occasionally seen it do something similar--not at power up, but if I am touching the two reed swtich wires, and let go. I never really saw what the increment is, but I would see MPH flicker at some value I didn't get a chance to read usually, but sometimes saw as several hundred MPH, then it would zero and the odo would slowly increment like you see in your video. I suspect the two are related, and that it's an older "bug" that's made more problematic by one of the new features.

If it would help anyone troubleshoot this, I can attempt to replicate my version of the issue on video, but it is quite intermittent.

Huh, until you'd mentioned it, I hadn't even noticed that my speedometer was in fact reading 400+ MPH while this was occurring.

My new bike is fast, but not that fast.

It's such an interesting coincidence that this is occurring at the same time that I'm getting an efficiency measurement (wh/mi) which is far too high. An inaccurate speed indication would explain the erroneous efficiency measurement were it not for the fact that the odometer reading was correct at the end of the ~11 mi trip.

If the speed reading (and odo) were reading too high, you would actually get a *lower* Wh/mile reading, showing higher efficiency than actual.

(this happens to me when my my speedo wires come untwisted; ever since one of the dogs chewed thru my speedo cable I have just left them twisted together, as it makes threading the cable thru things easier anyway, when I move the CA from bike to bike for experiments...this also makes possible my accidental touching of hte wires that let me see the error you see, from a different but probably related cause).

Just curious--does it matter if your magnet is near your sensor when the error occurs? Or does it only happen when the magnet is either on the sensor or away from it?

In the V3 next release you should add a dual setting for economy.
To activate -
If you press the left button for 1 sec it could jump to this mode or out of this mode. (2 sec = Setup)

Economy mode settings –
Set max speed
Set min speed (speed for hills, slow to save battery)
Set current limit – set to conserve battery
Set voltage limit – set lower than Normal Mode to use reserve power
Throttle ramp – either settable or defaults to a slow gentle ramp.
Software can try to minimise current keeping the bike between the max and min speeds

This would be easy to implement in the software, just an alternative set of parameters.

Cruzxia

amberwolf said:

If the speed reading (and odo) were reading too high, you would actually get a *lower* Wh/mile reading, showing higher efficiency than actual.

Click to expand...

Yes, I know. I realize that the inclusion of the parenthesis perhaps complicated that sentence. It should be read "I'm getting an efficiency measurement which is far too high." Eg, the efficiency is too high, indicated by the numbers being too low.


And oddly enough, this morning it didn't do it. I rode 4.92 miles, with an indicated consumption of 2.04 Ah, and it showed me an efficiency of 21 wh/mi, which would be correct for a voltage of 51-52v.

So we're back to just the speedo thing.

Just curious--does it matter if your magnet is near your sensor when the error occurs? Or does it only happen when the magnet is either on the sensor or away from it?

Click to expand...

Nope. It does this each and every time, regardless of wheel position. The sensor wiring is undamaged, and the behavior is unchanged even if I unplug the sensor at the back of the CA.

• EDIT:
  As of 04 Oct 2012, the information in this post has been superceded with authoritative documention on the Grin Tech site. The content in this post is no longer maintained.

Here’s two shots of the CA v3 from the new pilot batch just out.
Explanations of the various inputs can be found here.



Basically it’s the same animal as the early beta units but with all parts machine-placed on the PCB and with a full suite of cabling, ready to go. The unit is conceptually a CA-DPS (Direct Plug-in with Speedo) with an un-attached yellow speedo wire from the 6-pin controller ‘DrainBrain’ connector. This means the CA can be used out-of-box on either gear or DD bikes by using the wheel pick-up.

To eliminate the wheel pickup for DD installations, unsolder the pickup cable from the PCB and solder the loose yellow wire from pin 5 of the controller connector to the Sp pad of the PCB (under the square brown polyfuse). Reconfigure the pole count appropriately.

The case is the familiar 'large screen' version and provides openings for six cables. Since there are actually nine connectors, four share a short cable. These four connectors share two common PCB connections: +5v (red) and Gnd (black) which is accomplished with jumpers within the cable.

Well the new software sure changed things.

Now it cuts out every single time. I have all limiters turned off no speed or power limiting. I power up apply full throttle and it cuts out either right away or in a few seconds. Curiously if I baby it it seems last a bit longer but I get the same total distance up the road when it dies, weird.

Before the latest revision reseting 5 or 6 times in a row would allow the CA to work for the rest of the charge cycle. Like nothing ever happened. Currently though it's somewhere around 25 times sometimes more before it suddenly starts working. As soon as I disconnect the battery to charge it's back to cutout land and stays there. I can do this instantly if I hold the brakes on and twist the throttle so I'm thinking it's watt or amp related bug. I've set all power limiting to 9 based values and temp sensing is disbaled.

The throttle input is correct and responsive but the output goes to the minimum and stays there. No amount of reactivating the throttle seems to help. It does this in all throttle modes including pass-thru.

I'll reflash to the version you emailed me of b13 to confirm that this version still has no problems with my setup and post my results.

Maybe I set the watt limit to a setting close to 9999 watts and it rolled over due to averaging and there is a hidden 1 added somewhere that the display is to small to show. Something in the pid calculations is sampling the volt sense inputs before they fully stabilize? is the speed sensor a common ground device?

I could post a video of what happens but, really do we need to see it?
\

Waldo said:

I notice that speed less than 4 mph does not show on the display, nor is it in the data file record.
With CA2 V2.25 the lowest indicated speed is 2.5mph.
Wheel = 2105.
It would be great if the CA could show speed aproaching 0.00.
Waldo

Click to expand...

If you have uniform spacing of your pulses, then you can make work to a lower value by reducing both the #poles and the wheel circumference by the same ratio. So for instance if you have 12 poles and 2105mm circumference and the lowest speed is 4mph, then if you changed it to 3 poles and 526mm circumference it would show down to 1mph.

With just one magnet pole as in the CA-DPS device there is a tradeoff to make between how quickly it shows 0mph when you stop and the lowest speed it can display. Say you want it to work down to 1mph, well on a bike with a 2105mm wheel that means one pulse every 4.5 seconds. If you are riding along and quickly come to a stop, it would take a full 4.5 seconds before the display would be able to show zero.

-Justin

justin_le said:

So attached here is the B15 version of the CA3 code. Please note that I've only had a few hours to field test on the bike and haven't run through nearly all usage scenarios, so there may be newly introduced bugs but to a first order it seems OK.

Click to expand...

The attached Beta15c is the same basic code but with several tweaks made to the battery SOC tables based on riding around with some different batteries and getting more data. The effect of voltage relaxation was having a particularly large effect in the LiFePO4 tables which are very voltage sensitive, so this one weights on the Ah data a more heavily.

-Justin

Joe Perez said:

Just got back from my first ride on the b15 code. Still working nicely in current-throttle mode, but I do have one new bug to report:

When I got home and reviewed the data from the trip, the main screen told me that I'd ridden 11.4 miles (which is correct) and consumed 4.45 Ah (which is probably correct, based on past experience), however a few screens over it claimed that I'd achieved an efficiency of 13.8 watt-hours per mile. Given that I have a 52v LiFe battery, this is wrong. (Normally, the displayed wh/mile value matches a manual computation [Ah / miles * 51] and produces a value of around 20-23 depending on terrain and rider effort.)

Click to expand...

Hey Joe, can you tell me what your CA has on record for the %regen and regen amp-hours? I haven't changed anything at all in the Wh/mi calculations so it's odd this would suddenly be off, but the calculation can get a bit non-intuitive when there is regen Ah in the picture.

-Justin

Joe Perez said:

Nope. It does this each and every time, regardless of wheel position. The sensor wiring is undamaged, and the behavior is unchanged even if I unplug the sensor at the back of the CA.

Click to expand...

Hey Joe, bug noted. It doesn't do this on any of the multitude of CA V3's I've got on the bench, but it implies there is some variable somewhere that isn't being initialized properly and in yours it happens to power on in an initialized state that gives a false speed reading. I am curious if you see the same thing, not just at power on, but also right after pressing and holding the reset button?

-Justin

Is the v3 coming onto the market any time soon? Thx.

Justin, I have a bit more data on the speedometer issue, but I'll address your question first:

I am curious if you see the same thing, not just at power on, but also right after pressing and holding the reset button?

Click to expand...

It never happens after a reset. It always happens after a poweron.


Now, a bit more data:

1: If I am already moving forward at a decent rate of speed (pedaling) when I switch the unit on, I don't see the phenomenon as dramatically on the realtime speedo display (it might only get up to 50-100 MPH) however MaxS still records a peak in excess of 400 MPH.

2: If I switch speedo units to Km instead of Mi, the glitch goes away completely. When I switch back to Mi, it comes right back.

3: I may have been mistaken about this being new in b15. As I was poking around, I remembered that my MaxS reading has never been correct (going back to when I got the unit with, IIRC, b12 or b13 code.) It has always displayed a value in the neighborhood of 400+ MPH. I didn't know what to make of this at the time, but it now makes total sense, at that's around the peak it hits during this power-on glitch. I'd never noticed it before, but I'll bet this has been happening since I first installed the unit. I left my laptop at the office, but I'll try to revert back to b13 or b14 to test this theory.




As for the Wh/mi glitch I noted, I have been keeping a close eye on this, and I have not seen it re-occur since the original instance. I'm willing to write this one off to cosmic rays, or perhaps a sign that I should cut back on the amount of LSD I consume when I ride.

Joe Perez said:

Now, a bit more data:
2: If I switch speedo units to Km instead of Mi, the glitch goes away completely. When I switch back to Mi, it comes right back.

Click to expand...

Hey Joe, super valuable info, that's just what I needed to see what's going on and the problem is reproduceable here and will be fixed in the Beta16 code. Turns out in one of the attempts to more completely initialize all the memory on power-on to prevent this exact kind of thing, I was re-initializing to zero a byte that had previously been initialized to a different value.

Thanks for catching this, and no need to change your consumption habits,

-Justin

No problem, glad it helped.

I actually feel kind of bad about being one of "those guys" who still use archaic systems of measurement. Oddly enough, I find myself easily working in °C, kPa, and millimeters when it comes to all things automotive and mechanical, but I've just never made to switch to thinking in Km and Km/H when it comes to distance and velocity.

After destroying my old CA I purchased a CA V3 but seem to have a slight problem.
Ive flashed the CA to v3B15 and done the basic config. When I go to accelerate it feels like its on 5amps or something, its just crawling.
Ive got my RShunt to 0.950 and the rest of my setting exactly the same as in this post
http://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=37964&hilit=cycle+analyst&start=405#p599109
And I'm getting really high speed reading soon as I touch the throttle. Something like 100-150km/h.

Ive read through the post in here but haven't seen anyone with the same issue. Have I missed something?

Okay - just to clarify some points (apologies for basic questions - just making sure of the setup :wink: )

1. 
   

   scorpi00n said:

   Ive flashed the CA to v3B15 and done the basic config.

   Click to expand...

2. Do you have the throttle wired up with the classic Throttle override (i.e. throttle goes to controller, CA DP connector as original or eqivalent) or do you have the throttle wired into the CA?
3. By 'basic config' do you mean the throttle and other setup steps described here?
   

   scorpi00n said:

   When I go to accelerate it feels like its on 5amps or something, its just crawling.

   Click to expand...

4. Does the Throttle Out (To) voltage appear to properly follow the Throttle In (Ti) voltage on the voltage debug screen (1 screen left of Main)? Normally, Ti will follow the operator throttle between min and max config settings and the scaled To will follow it between the configured min and max output values. To will be reduced by the CA (will not follow Ti) if any of the configured limiting conditions come into play.
   

   scorpi00n said:

   And I'm getting really high speed reading soon as I touch the throttle. Something like 100-150km/h.

   Click to expand...

5. Are you using the wheel pickup or the yellow DP wire for your speedo?
6. Is Spd -> #Poles set appropriately?

I'm thinking the low power is a secondary symptom of the abnormally high speed reading. If the number of poles is incorrectly set (e.g. '1' poles with DP connection instead of something like '23'), the perceived speed will be too high, which will throw the CA into Speed Limiting and the CA will incorrectly but appropriately reduce To to slow down the 'speeding' bike. This will make the bike crawl along as the CA thinks it is limiting it to 99kph. Just a thought....

teklektik said:

Okay - just to clarify some points (apologies for basic questions - just making sure of the setup :wink: )

1. 
   

   scorpi00n said:

   Ive flashed the CA to v3B15 and done the basic config.

   Click to expand...

2. Do you have the throttle wired up with the classic Throttle override (i.e. throttle goes to controller, CA DP connector as original or eqivalent) or do you have the throttle wired into the CA?
3. By 'basic config' do you mean the throttle and other setup steps described here?
   

   scorpi00n said:

   When I go to accelerate it feels like its on 5amps or something, its just crawling.

   Click to expand...

4. Does the Throttle Out (To) voltage appear to properly follow the Throttle In (Ti) voltage on the voltage debug screen (1 screen left of Main)? Normally, Ti will follow the operator throttle between min and max config settings and the scaled To will follow it between the configured min and max output values.
   

   scorpi00n said:

   And I'm getting really high speed reading soon as I touch the throttle. Something like 100-150km/h.

   Click to expand...

5. Are you using the wheel pickup or the yellow DP wire for your speedo?
6. Is Spd -> #Poles set appropriately?

I'm thinking the low power is a secondary symptom of the abnormally high speed reading. If the number of poles is incorrectly set (e.g. '1' poles with DP connection instead of '23'), the perceived speed would be too high, which would throw the CA into Speed Limiting and the CA would incorrectly but appropriately reduce To to slow down the 'speeding' bike. This would make the bike crawl along as the CA thought it was limiting it to 99kph. Just a thought....

Click to expand...

Ok to clear things up basically Ive connected the CA to my controller and havent really done much more other than; set wheel size, #poles to 23, Km, RShunt to 0.950 and battery setting to my batteries spec.

Ive taken some photos of screens to show you what it all looks like in my menus;
http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/7717/img0457hp.jpg
http://img836.imageshack.us/img836/8500/img0458lf.jpg
http://img193.imageshack.us/img193/7602/img0459so.jpg
http://img337.imageshack.us/img337/7399/img0460vt.jpg
http://img193.imageshack.us/img193/4043/img0461jn.jpg
http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/3230/img0462vi.jpg
http://img441.imageshack.us/img441/5272/img0463m.jpg
http://img641.imageshack.us/img641/7479/img0464fs.jpg
http://img43.imageshack.us/img43/7127/img0465thq.jpg
http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/3872/img0466ea.jpg
http://img140.imageshack.us/img140/9416/img0467f.jpg
http://img266.imageshack.us/img266/5084/img0468sm.jpg
http://img823.imageshack.us/img823/2862/img0469ul.jpg
http://img232.imageshack.us/img232/8926/img0470ls.jpg
http://img52.imageshack.us/img52/1070/img0471sn.jpg
http://img716.imageshack.us/img716/127/img0472ia.jpg
http://img715.imageshack.us/img715/3431/img0473zx.jpg
http://img694.imageshack.us/img694/4790/img0474d.jpg
http://img94.imageshack.us/img94/301/img0475pr.jpg
http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/7214/img0476it.jpg

scorpi00n said:

Ok to clear things up basically Ive connected the CA to my controller and havent really done much more other than; set wheel size, #poles to 23, Km, RShunt to 0.950 and battery setting to my batteries spec.

Click to expand...

Since you did not mention the DP yellow wire, the wheel sensor, or any soldering, I'm assuming that you have one of the original beta V3 models and not the newer pilot run with attached cables. The original beta units had the speed input (Sp) wired up to the DP connector.

Your snaps show average and max speeds of 93.7kph and 179kph respectively. This is very curious and certainly fast enough to throw the CA into Speed Limiting at least part of the time (i.e. faster than default setting of SLim->MaxSpeed = 99.9kph).

But also:

Because you have not relocated your throttle connections to the CA, the unit must be operated in classic 'Throttle Override' mode which is not the default. To enable that legacy mode, I believe you will need to disable the dedicated throttle input by setting ThrI->Cntrl Mode=Disabled.

I just gave this a try and things did not work as I expected. With ThI disconnected:

• If ThrI->Cntrl Mode = Pass-thru , the CA will fix the Throttle Out voltage (To) to a value corresponding to the scaled Throttle In voltage (Ti) of 0.37v (default voltage when disconnected). This will in turn clamp the operator throttle to To plus one diode drop which will likely limit your bike to a low speed. This limiting mechanism is detailed in the CA v2.23 Manual Section 7.1. Your screen snap shows To equal to ThrO->MinOutput or 0.90v so your operator throttle will never be allowed to exceed about 0.9v+0.7v ~= 1.6v.
  
  (The default Ti of 0.37v when disconnected seems odd - I would have expected it to be pulled down to 0v, but that's another question not directly related to this situation....)
  
  
• If ThrI->Cntrl Mode = Disabled, I expected ThrO->MinOutput and ThrO->MaxOutput to take on the roles of ITermMin and ITermMax in the CA v2.23 (see section 8.11 + 8.12 of the CA v2.23 Manual) -- that is, I expected To to nominally equal ThrO->MaxOutput (3.74v in your case) to allow the operator throttle voltage to the controller to vary without clamping. However, To actually seems to stay pinned at ThrO->MinOutput exactly as in the case of ThrI->Cntrl Mode=Pass-thru. This seems puzzling...

So, the reason for the low speed seems due to a low fixed To clamp voltage and possibly due to sporadic Speed Limiting, but the procedure to properly configure the v3 for legacy Throttle Override mode needs clarification from Justin. I pinged him to take a break from coding B16 and help out with this configuration...

Until this gets cleared up, you can temporarily get your bike running with CA monitoring but w/o CA limiting by either:

1. configuring ThrO->MinOutput = ThrO->MaxOutput = 4.99v (should work by tricking the CA into never lowering the Throttle Out voltage even when it should be clamping), or
2. unsoldering the green ThO wire (from the DP connector) on the CA PCB.

Or - you could sidestep this question and move the throttle connections to the CA to get all the new features...

lizardboy said:

Well the new software sure changed things.

Now it cuts out every single time. I have all limiters turned off no speed or power limiting. I power up apply full throttle and it cuts out either right away or in a few seconds. Curiously if I baby it it seems last a bit longer but I get the same total distance up the road when it dies, weird.

Click to expand...

Hey Lizardboy, can you tell me if you are setup in miles rather than km? If so, can you switch to km and see if this changes things? I'll need to check but I have a hunch these issues might be related. -Justin

teklektik said:

Until this gets cleared up, you can temporarily get your bike running with CA monitoring but w/o CA limiting by either:

1. configuring ThrO->MinOutput = ThrO->MaxOutput = 4.99v (should work by tricking the CA into never lowering the Throttle Out voltage even when it should be clamping), or
2. unsoldering the green ThO wire (from the DP connector) on the CA PCB.

Or - you could sidestep this question and move the throttle connections to the CA to get all the new features...

Click to expand...

Okay - Justin cleared this up:
In the event of a normally wired v3 bike (throttle wired into the CA) where the operator accidentally set ThrI->CntrlMode=Disabled, the bike would just take off at WOT if ThrI->CntrlMode=Disabled simply forced ThrO to ThrO->MaxOutput. For safety reasons, the proper procedure for legacy operation requires a couple of extra settings to try to ensure this is intentional.

• To set up v3 for legacy 'Throttle Override' operation:
  1. Set ThrI->CntrlMode=Disabled
     (ThrI->CntrlMode = Pass-thru seems a viable alternative - I'm waiting for an answer on that one)
  2. Set ThrI->MinInput = 0.00v
  3. Set ThrI->MaxInput = 0.02v

With ThI disconnected, the default 0.37v input will exceed ThrI->MaxInput = 0.02v forcing ThrO to ThrO->MaxOutput until circumstances force a limiting condition.

So, scorpi00n, give this a whirl - it should cure the low power issue or at least let us move on to the flukey speed issue...

The unofficial basic setup instructions have been expanded to additionally cover setup for legacy mode (Throttle Override) operation.

teklektik said:

teklektik said:

Until this gets cleared up, you can temporarily get your bike running with CA monitoring but w/o CA limiting by either:

1. configuring ThrO->MinOutput = ThrO->MaxOutput = 4.99v (should work by tricking the CA into never lowering the Throttle Out voltage even when it should be clamping), or
2. unsoldering the green ThO wire (from the DP connector) on the CA PCB.

Or - you could sidestep this question and move the throttle connections to the CA to get all the new features...

Click to expand...

Okay - Justin cleared this up:
In the event of a normally wired v3 bike (throttle wired into the CA) where the operator accidentally set ThrI->CntrlMode=Disabled, the bike would just take off at WOT if ThrI->CntrlMode=Disabled simply forced ThrO to ThrO->MaxOutput. For safety reasons, the proper procedure for legacy operation requires a couple of extra settings to try to ensure this is intentional.

• To set up v3 for legacy 'Throttle Override' operation:
  1. Set ThrI->CntrlMode=Disabled
     (ThrI->CntrlMode = Pass-thru seems a viable alternative - I'm waiting for an answer on that one)
  2. Set ThrI->MinInput = 0.00v
  3. Set ThrI->MaxInput = 0.02v

With ThI disconnected, the default 0.37v input will exceed ThrI->MaxInput = 0.02v forcing ThrO to ThrO->MaxOutput until circumstances force a limiting condition.

So, scorpi00n, give this a whirl - it should cure the low power issue or at least let us move on to the flukey speed issue...

Click to expand...

Did what you said and its all fine now
At least this way it will keep me going until I get around to connecting the throttle to the CA.

Thanks!