Forcing the turtle

I had an idea. As we all know, these cars have no cruise control and trying to keep a slow speed to maximize range can be quite daunting. How about if there was a way to force the turtle to appear with no actual reason? This might reduce the power output and perhaps speed to artificially. Any clues on how to trigger it without causing any other trouble?

Is there a code CaniOn could keep sending to make this happen?

The reason for asking this is that I heard you can build a device that forces the Think EV to turtle mode.

Interesting proposition, though faking the car into turtle mode may cause firmware issues and has safety risks as you won't have full power available to escape dangerous situations. Then again, I'm not sure if turtle mode will give you the desired results. I've went as far as three miles into turtle and had no loss of power.

I use ECO mode all the time, and it is great for making you push on the pedal for power, but you can still easily go faster than you want to.

I've pondered the feasibility of an Arduino cruise control. You have a speed pickup somewhere (possibly even from the CANbus), with a few buttons as inputs, and the Arduino controls a servo that has an elastic connection to the throttle pedal. Elastic so that the cruise system can be physically overridden if something happens to it. Of course, you also have an input connected to the brake light circuit so that pressing the brake pedal shuts off the cruise.

For some reason every time someone suggests I need more power to escape a dangerous situation the only thing I can think of is Godzilla.

Generally, escaping, or more like avoiding dangerous situations in my experience involves the brake pedal and steering wheel.

Unfortunately the C-Zero I have only has D for drive, no Eco or B modes. Maybe I just need to shell out 450€ for that Waeco cruise control.

I think of situations where you are getting onto a highway and need full power to get to speed, or when turning onto another road, you look back and suddenly see a truck bearing down on you :shock: . Got to love those intersections on a blind curve :roll: .

I suppose one could add a spring or elastic band to put more resistance on the throttle pedal. That could simulate ECO mode.

I know an easy way to disable ABS, but not activating turtle mode. A valet mode would be nice, but we aren't driving Tesla Roadsters :lol: .

jsantala said:

...Generally, escaping, or more like avoiding dangerous situations in my experience involves the brake pedal and steering wheel...

Click to expand...

Generally, I would agree with you, although last year when I was in my Sparrow I oh-so-narrowly escaped being T-boned by an SUV that ran a stop sign and was coming in fast on my left - the lithium Sparrow is an overpowered slingshot on steroids with NO time delay in responding to the accelerator (unlike our i-MiEV off the line with its couple-of-second power ramp-up). The guy just missed my tail! :shock:

Back on topic, I thought an annoying audible tone when the power needle goes above the green zone could train us like Pavlov's dog. Hmmm, maybe a CaniOn add-on feature?

CaniOn could also make a loud noise if a set speed limit is reached in addition to a set power output! It would be easy to keep a set speed and consumption indeed if you wouldn't have to watch the gauges, but could just hear when you need to ease off the pedal.

I accidently found out a way to force a turtle today. I started TORQUE app while driving and while it was doing it's scan I got the whole christmas tree of warning lights on my dash including the turtle. It was a bit scary because regen was also lost and I was going downhill so the car suddenly accelerated on it's own instead of decelerating. It was a bad turtle as well, since I lost a lot of power too. Pedal had to be pressed a lot to accelerate. Needless to say I won't be doing THAT again.

Also, I found another Android GPS Speedo app that has a nasty warning sound for when you cross a set speed limit. Does the trick.

That is a really interesting post. I think someone else posted that he tried torque and got a Christmas tree of lights.

What i find intersting and encouraging is that torque fired a lot of can data into the car and caused the havoc but the car recovered. Not that i would want to do this but its encouraging that the car did not latch a failure and would not start or needed to go to mitsubishi to be reset with the mut 3 program. Maybe it was just luck.

I think its only a matter of time before someone starts injecting can data into the car to have new functionality.

For example It would be great to be able to charge and drive at the same time using a 220 volt generator. Or perhaps have the trip meter display your canion watt hr per km number. Or have the amp meter display range remaining. The existing instrument cluster could be driven with other data.

Don.....

I think what makes the i-MiEV so seemingly tolerable to CAN interference is the fact that CAN is nearly fully redundant with a K-line system for critical components. With that, many of the critical connections don't touch the CAN bus and stay local to certain computers.

Having the display on the dash show different information probably wouldn't be that difficult. An intermediate device (Arduino?) could intercept the CAN data to the gauges and re-transmit modified CAN data to the gauges and spoof any feedback to the car to make everything look normal to the EV-ECU.

The OBDLink app will do the same. I've gotten RBS, EMU Warning, ASC active, and ASC Off. Once, my OVMS module crashed and the car's frontend completely rebooted, but I maintained motive power and kept full control of the car (I was backing into a parking space when it happened).

Another trick to reduce power output is to ride with your foot on the brake pedal :lol: . The regen pot box will trim the throttle. That is a good piece of info to keep in your head should the accelerator get stuck, simply push the brake (and put the car in N).

(Don't actually drive around with your foot on the brake pedal.)