GEVCU Software Update Procedure: Updating Your GEVCU Software for Optimal Performance

Hello, I'm Jack Rickard with Electric Vehicle Television. Today we're going to present an instructional video on how to upgrade the software in our Generalized Electric Vehicle Control Unit, or GEVCU. The GEVCU, a history of it, might be in order.

Let me get a couple of things arranged here. In November of 2012, we acquired a large number of Siemens 1PV5133 AC induction motors from the liquidation bankruptcy auction of a company called Azure Dynamics. Azure Dynamics had developed a e-transit connect, a light van, electric driven, for a Ford Motor Company.

They were kind of a high flyer for a while, but eventually the dogs got them. They went bankrupt and an auction was held to their assets. We picked up 65 of these motors, along with 50, I think originally, of what they called the DMOC645 digital motor controller.

We eventually picked up another 10 from individuals and so forth of these controllers. Subsequent to all that, Siemens had been stuck with over 100 of the motors designed specifically for this project that they were unable to dispose of, and we acquired those. We have a large number of motors and controllers to sell to our viewers, which is kind of an interesting play on our part, since there's no way to use them.

The DMOC645 used in the Azure Dynamics had had all of the software and inputs removed where you could enter throttle voltages, brake voltages, and various signals to control the inverter to drive the motor. In fact, the only way to drive it with the firmware that was available in it was by CAN message. CAN is the Controller Area Network Protocol developed by Bosch in 1987 to try to minimize the raw poundage of copper wire that was growing in automobiles as so many new features and electronics were added, and it's proven a very popular strategy.

Today, almost all new cars have not only a CAN network, but often three or four of them. The Chevy Volt has 104 multi-controllers in the car all talking to each other over CAN, for example. This has caused kind of an interesting thing.

These inverters and motors that you see today are somewhat commoditized. They're kind of generic. The concept is that the original equipment manufacturers, automotive manufacturers, want to be able to take any motor and any inverter, but particularly ones that perhaps they manufacture, and drop it in any model car with no changes to the motor or the inverter.

So they make them somewhat generic, and then they install a device called the Vehicle Control Unit, which is a little computer, a multi-controller, with software written specifically for that vehicle. It manages all the vehicle systems. It's the brains of the car, and it gets the inputs from the throttle, and from the brake, and from the ignition key, and from the gear selector, and so forth, and makes intelligent decisions as to what CAN protocol message to send to the generic inverter and motor to drive the car.

Some of the brains are the unique aspects of the vehicle are held in software in this small, inexpensive Vehicle Control Unit. That enables them to drop in any motor and controller, and with a few changes to the software, work with the same car. It's actually kind of an interesting development.

But we didn't have a VCU, and worse, we don't have a car model. We have a bunch of people making a bunch of different vehicles electric, and in fact, they have a variety of throttles, and accelerators, and a variety of brakes, and a wide variety of needs and wants as to what they want this inverter and motor to do. The key element of the VCU is that it's in software, and it's considered proprietary by the manufacturer.

In fact, if they need to change or upgrade it for that particular vehicle, they issue a recall and have all the people that have the vehicle bring it into the dealer and flash new software in it to make the changes. There are no configurable items in it that even can be made in the dealership, much less by the end user. If you want more regenerative braking or less regenerative braking, don't want it on the throttle, or do want it on the throttle, you kind of have to buy a car that's set up that way.

You don't get to change any of that. For individuals building their own electric cars, and for the university alternate energy programs that we've become very popular with, and prototypers, people who are working on a prototype of a vehicle they'd like to get funding for, and develop, and sell. And that's our viewership, and that's where our components go to.

But they want to be able to change everything. And so we decided to launch a program to develop what we call the Generalized Electric Vehicle Control Unit (GEVCU), where it had an interface where you could actually change many of the variables that you want to change. What the voltage is on the throttle input that you want to control the thing, and how much regenerative braking, and how the brake connects, and and how to turn on the brake lights, and pre-charge the unit, and many other basic configuration items, without doing any software programming at all.

And so we developed the GEVCU to do just that, to provide two interfaces, one by wireless website, and another with a basic USB serial port command interface, where you could make changes to the crucial variables determining vehicle operation, and kind of tune your inverter and controller to the specific vehicle application you had. We originally bought 65 of the motors, and 50, I think, of the DMOC 645s. The motors are made by Siemens, and in fact they had a stockpile of another 100 ready for delivery to Azure Dynamics.

And they were kind of stuck with them, because Azure Dynamics went broke. So we bought those two, so that brought us to 165 motors. The trick is the DMOC 645 was made by Azure Dynamics, who is now corporately deceased, and there will be no more made.

It's extinct. Once we sell out of those, we have no more. And so for the last year, we've been scrambling around trying to get other inverter manufacturers to do the necessary fine tuning or characterization of their inverters to the Siemens 1PV5133 motor.

We've had some modest success. Reinhart Motion Systems has characterized their line of inverters to the Siemens. Scott Osborne in New Zealand, we've just received our first Scott drive.

This is a 150 kilowatt AC three-phase inverter that will operate the Siemens. And we're talking pretty seriously with SEVCON. They have a new gen 4 series, generation 4, series 8, and series 10 inverters that are pretty strong and could potentially drive this.

And so the generalized electric vehicle control unit will kind of allow all this to live on, and for us to use those remaining motors with a variety of inverters. It goes quite beyond that. We're working on a module for example for the UQM Power Phase 10, and I've acquired 10 drivetrains, those from the Coda bankruptcy.

And that sort of opens your eyes to sort of the future. This is how the OEMs make electric cars. They all use AC systems, and they're kind of generic, and they deal with it with a VCU.

So if we can get the generalized electric vehicle control unit, if we can do a module to do CAN messages for the Nissan LEAF inverter, you would be able to use salvaged motors and inverters from the Nissan LEAF to an electric car project. Potentially the drivetrain from the Model S, they wreck those too. And the Chevy Spark, and the Chevy Volt, the BMW i3, and the list goes on.

We think GEVCU could be the CAN opener to allow us access to a cornucopia of future drivetrain components that are fallouts from the original equipment manufacturers or automakers efforts to build electric cars. And so it's kind of important. The GEVCU is based on the Arduino Due.

This is an inexpensive educational platform. I quite like their little integrated design environment. It's C++ is where they do the software, but it installs on Linux or Windows or Macintosh quite easily.

It's a simple interface and a simple IDE. It doesn't do what a lot of people want to do with a software development thing, but it's simple and it's easy to learn. And the Arduino Dewey came out about the same time that we announced the JEVQ project.

And this is a very capable 84 megahertz ARM3 Cortex multi-controller that's several orders of magnitude faster and more capable 32-bit system compared to the Arduino's previous 8-bit 16 megahertz type of controllers. And better yet, the chip itself supports two CAN bus channels. And so we have taken that and done our own board with one USB port and brought it out to this amp seal 35 connector and hardened it and made it put some DC to DC converters in it, clean up the power supply thing where it's suitable to work in an automotive environment.

With a more limited set of inputs, we can do four analog inputs and four digital inputs and eight digital or analog outputs. And so it's sort of a limited set of Arduino. Unfortunately, there's no easy way to update the software in it.

There's no binary flashing procedure for it. I can't send you a file and have you update it. So we've sold quite a few JEVQs and continue to do so, but we also continue with the software.

Now you may not need a module to drive the UQM or the Reinhardt in your GEVCU if you have a Siemens motor and a DMOC 645. But we continue to improve the software in other ways too. And we've made the web interface a little more informative and interactive and added features to drive cooling fans based on temperature, to drive brake lights based on regenerative braking, pre-charge procedures to run a couple of relays to pre-charge your DMOC 645 or other inverter.

And so we continue to work on the software. Sooner or later you're going to want to update that software. And so I'm trying to make a rational procedure that's doable, if non-trivial, to do that.

You don't have to do any C++ coding. What you do have to be able to point to the software and click the compile button and to flash the GEVCU Arduino Due processor. A little bit further complicated and there's actually two processors in the GEVCU in order to have that wireless web page interface and not interfere or take away from our main controller operation which is to drive the inverter.

There's a second processor in the box. They connect one module that handles all the wireless and all the web. And that holds an image of a website that we actually upload wirelessly to that module.

And so when we update the software often there's also a upgrade to the website interface because of new variables that you can change in that interface. So we're going to have a procedure on how to reflash that web image into the Connect One. So let's get started.

We're going to do a couple break this into a couple of pieces. One is we're going to download and install the Arduino software. We're going to second make sure you have the correct libraries in the Arduino to operate the GEVCU software.

We're going to download the GEVCU software and compile it. And then we're going to flash the Connect One module with a new website image. And that's kind of the procedure to get your GEVCU up to the latest in software in case that's the thing you would want to do.

Stay with us.