Bluetooth
Far Drive have an Android/iPhone app and Bluetooth dongle
Now technically, this is just a serial to bluetooth dongle - probably taking TTL serial data, some power and creating a bluetooth dongle. It was cheap enough that I just purchased it from China and will play with other connections later.
Installation
Plug to find
Note: The plug is actually connected to a lead that goes into the rear seat, but with only the transmit wire from the controller. I’m assuming this is to allow people to connect bluetooth dongles or similar and read values but not make any changes.
Bluetooth dongle installed
I connected it into the originanl plug, removing the wire to the rear seat, allowing full control.
Serial, Bluetooth, CAN
This connector is serial and power - and is used for this dongle and for direct connection to a windows laptop (although I still can’t source the software).
This bluetooth dongle, is just a regular bluetooth to serial dongle, and you could use others. Even the software on my android phone, picks up other bluetooth serial devices in the area.
Which serial, RS485, RS232, TTL is yet to be checked. I think it is RS485.
Next step will be to find the CAN bus addresses and messages. Some of them are pretty standard I think, such as speed - but not yet sure about voltage, and current.
The Dongle
It is easy to install and easy to use.
Security
Be aware there is ZERO security. If you leave this attached, then anyone with a laptop can change your settings. Use at your own risk.
Serial Protocol
TODO - I will be getting a dump of the data soon to analyse the information. I should then be able to extract the necessary data.
Points of interest
- Making changes here are temporary until reboot. Save to keep them.
- Changing things like motor direction - REALLY DOES - so be careful and lots of testing
- Rated power on this bike, although 5kW is set to 8kW - no idea what effect that has
- Throttle response from 0 (normal) to 1 (sport) has quite a significant shift. I found sport twitchy and suspect it will use a lot more battery power.
- The protection voltage is set to turn off at 56 volts, and bakc on 58 volts. This will be worth playing with later, to help me find out how to stop the sudden power off bug when battery is low.
- Voltage and Current, as well as throttle position are all here
- I’m going to update my battery monitor to use these, read from here instead to help with capacity.
- Capacity here seems to be related to voltage - just like the bars up the front, but here we get a whole percentage instead - this too could be easily displayed on my basic battery monitor.
- Since throttle position is seemingly accurate here - the bug with the display showing speed instead of throttle position is in the display.
- NOTE: The display is its own device, using the CAN bus (I think) to show speed etc. Not yet sure how to reprogram it, or better yet, replace it. (too hard to see in almost any sun, even with a black windshield).
- Current - had a lot of fun playing with current, like taking off up a hill, or with my feet down, and watching the current move. Very useful.
I didn’t get any further into looking at what they call curves (I would have called graphs, dials, and curves graphs/charts).
Software
Found a link to the code, yet to be tested