Status update. In recent weeks, I've been working on a big EV conference that we were co-organising here in HK, so haven’t done as much for OVMS as I would have wanted. That is now over, so I have more time for the project. The HK EV community has been pretty demoralised recently, by government policy changes. Getting everybody together for a conference was a good opportunity to try to revitalise things and reignite the community. I have been working on the iOS App. I brought in all the recent changes, and tried to update it to the latest iOS SDK. So much has changed in iOS, and a lot is now broken. It is going to be a hell of a job to get that properly working, let alone add the ‘messages’ tab I wanted to add to bring it on-par with the Android App. I have something like 200+ warning messages at build time, and core things like the async tcp/ip socket library we use is no longer reliable/usable. I’ve also been looking at cross platform frameworks, as a possibly better solution. So many are a mess, or commercially dubious, but I narrowed it down to Xamarin and Ionic (both meeting our criteria of ‘free’ to developers, as ‘free’ as possible, cross-platform, and viable for a project like OVMS. Xamarin looks very appealing, but I just hate that proprietary Microsoft thing hanging over it’s head. I know it is free (of charge, at least) now, but that could change at the whim of the people in Redmond. The cross platform design is fantastic; one IDE can see both platforms and it is very simple to build a single virtual class with platform-dependent implementations. Simulators are great. Integration (to github, sdks, etc) is great. Documentation examples are limited, which makes it a steep learning curve. Ionic (and other PhoneGap style frameworks) look good, but are much harder to get to the raw operating system. Even things like maps (web not native) are going to be troublesome given google’s recent pricing change. Getting a raw tcp/ip socket is not possible without platform dependent plugins (so we’d probably have to mess with adding websocket support to the OVMS v2 server). Overall, not nearly as polished as Xamarin. My current plan is to try to build a proof-of-concept with Xamarin. Just the very basics, to see what is possible. Open to offers / suggestions here. It really seems to me that having one cross-platform app would be better for the project long-term. On the vehicle side, I have some time (finally) this weekend to work on it. I’ll be making some changes I’ve had on my list, and then intend to build a 3.1.007 on Monday (my time). If there is anything people want to get into 3.1.007, please commit it before the Sunday day end. Hardware is in stock at Fasttech, and going well. Lots of people receiving their v3.1 kits now, so I expect support calls to increase over the coming week. Please help out with support tickets on www.openvehicles.com <http://www.openvehicles.com/>, or providing local support directly, where you can. We should be able to start the CE and FCC certification process soon, but I still need to sort out exactly who is responsible for what with the certification labs - getting the tests passed is one thing, but it seems that getting labels on the product is something else entirely. I’ve also been working with China on an optional display for OVMS. We sourced a pretty nice 3.5” LCD (based on ILI9488 chipset, driven by SPI bus, and supporting 320*480 resolution with 16 million colours). 4 push button switches (up, down, back, enter - or tasked differently depending on context). SD card, and USB. Enclosure size is about 78mm x 122mm x 26mm. It works with the Loboris ESP32 TFT library: https://github.com/loboris/ESP32_TFT_library <https://github.com/loboris/ESP32_TFT_library> The original idea was for a companion display to work alongside OVMS (perhaps using bluetooth GATT to talk to OVMS v3.1 modules). But using the same firmware framework seems sensible, and it ends up being pretty similar to a full OVMS v3.1. It seems wrong to remove features, but GPIOs are limited. Still playing with what is possible, cost vs functionality, but it seems feasible. Still playing around with whether this is a full OVMS v3.1 with a display, or just a very cut down display to connect to an OVMS v3.1. I’ve attached some pictures, below, to give you some ideas. Thanks, and Best Regards, Mark.
