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New Zealand Developers Building Open Source Code For Electric Cars
MatthewVD writes "New Zealand electric racecar developer Greenstage is close to finishing an open source project called 'Tumanako,' which would allow owners of electric cars and motorcycles to tweak the code in their vehicles. Electric vehicle gearheads grouse about proprietary code that keeps current, torque and speed within very conservative limits. 'In racing, you need the system to push all those parameters to the limits. You only need the system to survive until just past the finish line,' says Bill Dube, the owner of the record-setting KillaCycle. Open source code could also be used to build any type of electric vehicle, from cars and submarines to motor-launched aerial gliders, from scratch. It's like Linux for your Chevy Volt."
Good on ya mates!
Anybody can work under ideal circumstances. -- Jeff K. (January 4, 2001)
Now everyone can screw up the priority between the gas an brake pedal in regen mode!
Congratulations guys !
Now I can overclock my electric car.
It now goes from 0 to 100 in just over 48 seconds. Degrees Celcius that is.
1) I dont have a chevy volt, I bought a 40mpg Kia 2 years before the tax credits, and cash for clunkers were announced, and a little bitter that I did the right thing and got fuck all nothing for it.
2) I dont want to sound too assie, but how many gearheads are computer / electronic nerds? This may well be the future for more professional setups, but when you have local racer Johnny brazing spade terminals for a simple toggle switch with a blow torch looking at written instructions at the drag strip I dunno, seems ripe for people to come in, take the fruits of your labor, slap it on a 1$ rom and sell it as a 299$ speed chip.
...people named Keith download it and flash their car. (Top Gear reference, in case you're wondering)
200kW Inverters, Battery Management Systems, and chargers are all high price items right now. I'm curious to see where this goes. It's an ambitious undertaking but it could be done with the right people working on the project.
I had a weird mixed reaction to this, before I remembered what "electric car" actually means. Open-source electric cars are a great idea. However, if this were to be extended to autonomous cars I would begin to get worried. Allowing people the ability to modify the software controlling their autonomous vehicle seems to me an inherently bad idea.
..always knew they would come at last.
There are 2 types of people in the world - those who understand decimal and those who don't.
Is the gas engine equivalent. It'll be interesting to see if/when anyone actually uses either project, versus the software merely being there. The world doesn't operate according to Field of Dreams, building it means nothing. What matters is not what is there, but what people find useful.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
... of an article of 2009 on April 11, 2012?
I mean, technically.
It's like Linux for your Chevy Volt.
In that, nobody uses either. Zing!
*ducks*
See comment!
Just a quick point:
I'm not 100% sure about the Kiwis, but here in Australia, grouse has a completely different meaning.
Once I was almost hit by a silent electric motorcycle, which was speeding on a cycling path in a city at about 70 km/h, completely silent.
You only need the system to survive until just past the finish line,' says Bill Dube
While this is, in a race, true, it is a limit that a lot of race teams have bounced against and lost. Also, while I think most people receive value from what is learned in races, but they want their daily driver to have a little more longevity. Hopefully there's still enough pep to let the thing merge in traffic.
This is not "new" - it was reasonably common for NZ engineering students friends of mine to tweak the chips in the cars, 10 years ago. Granted it wasn't open source or terribly legal but it was quite common nonetheless. A couple of them actually made businesses out of it.
Maybe they can mange the repository on megaupload.
"I'm going to rebuild the car kernel and take her out for a spin" Sentences like this can give a more literal meaning to the crash and burn of a process. I suppose they take the injured driver to a hospital with his core dump. Who guarantees there was even adequate unit testing done before a car goes out onto the highway with other unsuspecting drivers? Then again, I suppose its the same answer as to when I added the airbag suspension to my low-rider without getting my car re-inspected.
Open Source hardware and software is all over the place in EV builds.
There's the "OpenRevolt" (http://www.paulandsabrinasevstuff.com/evmotorcontrollers.html) open source hardware and software electric motor controller. There's an open source hardware/software 10kW charger (http://www.emotorwerks.com/cgi-bin/VMcharger.pl). There are a wide choice of open source battery monitoring systems.
I'm not sure why this is (3 year old) news.
Just build your own car and you can have all that today. People have been doing open source motor controllers for years (see Open ReVolt for a polished example). You can code it up however you want. There's really not that much to tweak because electrics are so simple to begin with.
And they've posted some changes to comply with GPL. Not bad, guys. I love my Volt, it's a cool car, and I charge it with off-grid solar. It might not fly, but hey, I'll take this over the George Jetson car, because I can actually have this.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!