cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/24122615
A team of students from the Eindhoven University of Technology has built a prototype electric car with a built-in toolbox and components that can be easily repaired or replaced without specialist knowledge.
The university’s TU/ecomotive group, which focuses on developing concepts for future sustainable vehicles, describes its ARIA concept as “a modular electric city car that you can repair yourself”.
ARIA, which stands for Anyone Repairs It Anywhere, is constructed using standardised components including a battery, body panels and internal electronic elements that can be easily removed and replaced if a fault occurs.
With assistance from an instruction manual and a diagnostics app that provides detailed information about the car’s status, users should be able to carry out their own maintenance using only the tools in the car’s built-in toolbox, the TU/ecomotive team claimed.
It’s sounds bizarre to me that this couldn’t be resolved by rebooting.
Then again, how do you reboot a car exactly? It’s not “off” even when the car is not started I suppose.
You perform a battery reset of the low voltage system. Disconnect HV system, disconnect the 12V battery (or batteries) then short the positive and negative battery cables together for about half an hour. Then reattach 12V battery, and then turn HV system back on. Forces all the computer modules (normally about 30-50 modules in a modern car) to reboot from their base programming. Have to do this several times a week, often fixes weird electrical issues.
Uh, on the pcb side, to discharge condensers & co. Not on the battery side.
You don’t need to disconnect the HV. Electronics are all run on 12V.
I’ve tried disconnecting the 12V battery. I believe the technicians have tried disconnecting the 12V and HV batteries at the same time. All factory reset buttons have been pressed. We’ve tried plugging in a CHAdeMO and type 1 cable at the same time.
I’m also very surprised that something like this could be software related and persist across power failures/reboots.
It depends on where the variable for this is stored.
In ram then a reboot will fix it. But it looks like for some reason the engineer put it on non volatile memory.
There’s some complex mechanical interlocks involved in charging circuitry too. You can hear these beefy solenoids clunk on/off when plugging in a charging cable. A stuck solenoid could be implicated too, as some safety detection circuitry might check those to see if the car is currently in a charging configuration. That goes especially since moving parts are typically more likely to fail before anything else. Although, I’d be stunned if that wasn’t already considered.
Not solenoids, contactors technically.