[Ovmsdev] Charging Stopped vs Done

[Tom Saxton]

I appreciate getting notified anytime the charge ends prematurely as long as
I'm not getting texts at 4:00 am when the car finishes charging normally.

BTW, this alert mechanism saved Cathy and me from a four-hour wait on our
road trip in June. We drove from Seattle down the coast to San Francisco,
then back north up I-5, 1,823 miles over 12 days. We charged in all sorts of
wacky places: dodgy RV parks, waiting in line behind a parade of other EVs
at a hotel that has one of the most heavily used stations in the ChargePoint
network, a B&B from an extension cord running across the lawn, and a Blink
station that set a new record for low voltage at 187V. Through all of this,
I monitored the charging sessions with the OVMS app and depended on getting
an SMS message if anything interrupted the charge.

The charging went smoothly everywhere until the last night. We stayed at a
hotel in Portland where we had stayed and charged before, familiar ground
where I didn't expect any problem.

Just before midnight, a text message woke me up and alerted me that the
charge had been interrupted. I hustled out to the parking lot thinking
someone might be stealing the mobile connector (RFMC) with our home-built
J1772 adapter. When I got out there, nothing was disturbed, but the charge
had mysteriously ended about an hour into a 6-hour charge. I restarted the
charge and it finished without incident, but it would have been a big pain
if I hadn't been alerted to the early stop.

    Tom

on 8/15/12 11:24 PM, Mark Webb-Johnson wrote:

> 
> https://github.com/markwj/Open-Vehicle-Monitoring-System/issues/67
> 
> The car has two charging complete states (charging stopped and charging done)
> and a bunch of sub-states. So far, we've been trying to use the sub-states to
> differentiate between the charging completing normally or being stopped by the
> user in the car (or from the apps) vs the charging being aborted early from a
> source external to the car. The idea is that if you pop the breaker, you get
> an alert, but if you stop the charge from within the car or from the App, you
> don't.
> 
> The problem is, as Bennett points out, that there are some reasons internal to
> the car that should really be alerted (but aren't). A good example is
> 'extension cord detected'. The car reports that on the bus as state charging
> stopped sub-state that it was stopped from inside the car (which is true - the
> car detected the charging cord and stopped the charge) - which is not what we
> want.
> 
> The suggestion is to change to a simpler logic. If the car reports charge
> state 'charging done' (ie; charge went to completion and finished) then do
> nothing, but if charge state is 'charging stopped' (ie; something, whatever,
> stopped the charge before it reached completion) then alert (via SMS/IP PUSH).
> 
> The difference will be that we would then alert if you stopped the charge from
> within the car of from the iPhone App, but would also catch more wierd events
> like 'extension cord detected'.
> 
> Personally, I think this is a safer solution to the issue. We're going to
> catch more events this way, the logic is much simpler. The downside is that if
> you stop the charge from the App/Car you also get an alert.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> Mark.
> 
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