Build an additional IMA Data Display

3509 Views 18 Replies 8 Participants Last post by KL¥, Dec 26, 2020

DaNaoZhong

Discussion Starter · Oct 28, 2020

Hi everyone!
I myself don't own an CRZ, but I drive a ZE1 Insight. A friend of mine owns a CRZ, and for fun we had a look at the CAN bus and started to reverse engineer it.
The IMA CAN bus contains all the interesting information you would want to display on your instrument panel, such as IMA battery voltage, state of charge, and IMA current (A).

Logging these values, we found out that the CRZ has the same frustrating issues with the IMA battery as my Insight has, i.e. frequent IMA SOC recals if you have a degraded battery (dropping of the SOC to 25% or jumping up to 75%). The cluster is just pretty good at hiding it.

Anyway, long story short, I guess that we all want to know more about the inner status of our car. Hence I thought it would make sense to build a device to visualize this data, and I want to do it in an appealing way that is intuitive and just feels right. That's why I would like to ask you for your input.

Several ideas came to my mind:

Write a smartphone app that visualizes the data, and install a little piece of electronics somewhere, that collects the data and sends it out via bluetooth.
Use a custom LCD (difficult to program all the HMI, and to integrate it nicely into the car).
My friend installed an aftermarket head unit with Android CarPlay, if I remember correctly. Is there a possibility to install custom applications on these, or perhaps stream a video from an external device onto that screen? I think that would be my prefered option, as it would look very neat.

I won't consider any 7segment / dot matrix displays, this will look a bit too old fashioned.

What do you think? Do such devices to display IMA parameters already exist and I am wasting my time, or would that be a cool project?

In case you are interested in the CAN bit assignment, I uploaded a part of what we have decoded here: Honda CRZ ZE2 CAN Bit Assignment Sheet – texelography

Thank you!

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Spdbump

· #2 · Oct 28, 2020

Scan Gauge II » ScanGauge II has the ability to read some of this using their X-Gauge commands but it is dot matrix so fails that requirement. It is a small display unit that plugs directly into ODB II. I have set some of the gauges but the values seem off so maybe the commands do not all work with a 2013 CR-Z EX CVT.

Here is what they claim can be monitored in a Honda Hybrid.

» Honda-Acura

www.scangauge.com

www.scangauge.com

Reactions: 1

TNThomas

· #3 · Oct 28, 2020

Sounds cool! Would it be possible to show this information on the little display next to the speedo? That way, no visible modding has to be done, like adding screens or replacing the stock radio. I am not an expert at all, so it’s just an idea.

yayuuu

· #4 · Oct 29, 2020

DaNaoZhong said:
Hi everyone!
I myself don't own an CRZ, but I drive a ZE1 Insight. A friend of mine owns a CRZ, and for fun we had a look at the CAN bus and started to reverse engineer it.
The IMA CAN bus contains all the interesting information you would want to display on your instrument panel, such as IMA battery voltage, state of charge, and IMA current (A).

Logging these values, we found out that the CRZ has the same frustrating issues with the IMA battery as my Insight has, i.e. frequent IMA SOC recals if you have a degraded battery (dropping of the SOC to 25% or jumping up to 75%). The cluster is just pretty good at hiding it.

Anyway, long story short, I guess that we all want to know more about the inner status of our car. Hence I thought it would make sense to build a device to visualize this data, and I want to do it in an appealing way that is intuitive and just feels right. That's why I would like to ask you for your input.

Several ideas came to my mind:

Write a smartphone app that visualizes the data, and install a little piece of electronics somewhere, that collects the data and sends it out via bluetooth.

Use a custom LCD (difficult to program all the HMI, and to integrate it nicely into the car).

My friend installed an aftermarket head unit with Android CarPlay, if I remember correctly. Is there a possibility to install custom applications on these, or perhaps stream a video from an external device onto that screen? I think that would be my prefered option, as it would look very neat.

I won't consider any 7segment / dot matrix displays, this will look a bit too old fashioned.

What do you think? Do such devices to display IMA parameters already exist and I am wasting my time, or would that be a cool project?

In case you are interested in the CAN bit assignment, I uploaded a part of what we have decoded here: Honda CRZ ZE2 CAN Bit Assignment Sheet – texelography

Thank you!

Would you consider publishing a library with methods to read this data, so we could write our own apps? For example I'd like to control additional deviced based on power going to IMA motor.

MrFastFox666

· #5 · Oct 29, 2020

I'm not good at all with programming and the like, but i'd 150% love to have this available. I have an android head unit and it can totally run external apps, but I can't connect any bluetooth devices to it. I think it would be nice if whatever dongle you create supports USB, WIFI and Bluetooth. Also, would it be easy to write an app for the Raspberry Pi? I figure that many people would find that useful.

yayuuu said:
... I'd like to control additional deviced based on power going to IMA motor.

what would you do with this? you've piqued my interest

yayuuu

· #6 · Oct 29, 2020

MrFastFox666 said:
what would you do with this? you've piqued my interest

I've been thinking about 2 additional electric motors in rear wheels but with full inthegration with IMA system and for that I would need a signal to know whether the main electric motor is assisting or charging. There are few ways I would try to get this signal, like measuring the curret drawn by the motor or the last resort - directly from the dashboard, but a device that can read it from can-bus would be the most professional.
Overall, the idea is to connect new motors to the main battery, but also increase the battery capacity by doubling or tripling the amount of cells in parallel, new high-current wiring to 2 additional motor controllers and a signal from IMA to control the rear motors and possible improved IMA cooling.
It's more like a long-term project, right now I'm in the research phase. I found few motors that would work the way I want, especially this: Direct-drive in-wheel motors - Elaphe Elaphe S400 motor, which works at 100V and produces 23KW of power, so 2 motors are additional 46KW (62 HP). The company (Elaphe) isn't really selling it to individual customers, but I've been talking to a company in Poland that does electric conversions, hybrid upgrades etc and they told me that they probably would be able to get these motors for me.
As I said, long term project and asked about the library out of curiosity.

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Spdbump

· #7 · Oct 29, 2020

There was another poster here now gone who also talked about adding motors to the rear axle and he claimed he had done similar to other non CR-Zs probably not hybrids. He never showed any proof and it seemed like all fantasy. I wish you well on your project but probably by the time you will do this there will be off the shelf parts you could integrate but will need a custom ECU and other parts.

All this information he talks about is available on the OBD II port. The device I mentioned can display it. You could probably reverse engineer their device.

yayuuu said:
I've been thinking about 2 additional electric motors in rear wheels but with full inthegration with IMA system and for that I would need a signal to know whether the main electric motor is assisting or charging. There are few ways I would try to get this signal, like measuring the curret drawn by the motor or the last resort - directly from the dashboard, but a device that can read it from can-bus would be the most professional.
Overall, the idea is to connect new motors to the main battery, but also increase the battery capacity by doubling or tripling the amount of cells in parallel, new high-current wiring to 2 additional motor controllers and a signal from IMA to control the rear motors and possible improved IMA cooling.
It's more like a long-term project, right now I'm in the research phase. I found few motors that would work the way I want, especially this: Direct-drive in-wheel motors - Elaphe Elaphe S400 motor, which works at 100V and produces 23KW of power, so 2 motors are additional 46KW (62 HP). The company (Elaphe) isn't really selling it to individual customers, but I've been talking to a company in Poland that does electric conversions, hybrid upgrades etc and they told me that they probably would be able to get these motors for me.
As I said, long term project and asked about the library out of curiosity.

yayuuu

· #8 · Oct 29, 2020

Spdbump said:
There was another poster here now gone who also talked about adding motors to the rear axle and he claimed he had done similar to other non CR-Zs probably not hybrids. He never showed any proof and it seemed like all fantasy. I wish you well on your project but probably by the time you will do this there will be off the shelf parts you could integrate but will need a custom ECU and other parts.

All this information he talks about is available on the OBD II port. The device I mentioned can display it. You could probably reverse engineer their device.

Adding rear motors to non-hybrid car might be actually easier, as you don't need to inthegrate it with current sustem, just add separate system that only reads signal from throttle potentiometer. The same can be done to CRZ with separate battery, the only problem is, that it wouldn't show battery level on the main instrument cluster, but you would have a separate screen. That's why I would like to inthegrate it in the current system, which should be possible. The main limiting factor for me currently is the availability of electric motors. There are currently available motors in China, but they are bulky, heavy and would require wide rear fenders. There are few companies who don't sell the motors to individual customers and there are few more still in development. I hope that more products will be available before I start with this project, but as I said, it's more of a future project than current. I'm going for a supercharger next year and few more mods accociated with it, like clutch, exhaust, etc. Only after all of the obvious mods I'll be looking into rear motors more seriously, so as I said, I asked about the library out of curiosity, because it's better to collect as many informations as possible before jumping in. I'm a programmer, but I don't have too much experience with canbus. I only know the basics of how it works, but never tried to decode it. Also, it's not the only way to get the assist/chrg level, you can also add a high current low resistance resistor before the IMA electric motor and measure the voltage drop across the resistor and amplify it with a transistor to get the correct voltage for the external motor controller.

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MrFastFox666

· #9 · Oct 29, 2020

yayuuu said:
I've been thinking about 2 additional electric motors in rear wheels but with full inthegration with IMA system and for that I would need a signal to know whether the main electric motor is assisting or charging. There are few ways I would try to get this signal, like measuring the curret drawn by the motor or the last resort - directly from the dashboard, but a device that can read it from can-bus would be the most professional.
Overall, the idea is to connect new motors to the main battery, but also increase the battery capacity by doubling or tripling the amount of cells in parallel, new high-current wiring to 2 additional motor controllers and a signal from IMA to control the rear motors and possible improved IMA cooling.
It's more like a long-term project, right now I'm in the research phase. I found few motors that would work the way I want, especially this: Direct-drive in-wheel motors - Elaphe Elaphe S400 motor, which works at 100V and produces 23KW of power, so 2 motors are additional 46KW (62 HP). The company (Elaphe) isn't really selling it to individual customers, but I've been talking to a company in Poland that does electric conversions, hybrid upgrades etc and they told me that they probably would be able to get these motors for me.
As I said, long term project and asked about the library out of curiosity.

I think this would be super nice. It would make the CR-Z almost like the NSX, but backwards lol. over 60hp of additional electric power would make an enormous difference on the car, I think. I think that at this point, though, you'd definitely need a higher capacity battery. Maybe you could extend the battery into the trunk. It would likely make the trunk floor taller thus reducing cargo volume, but hey, more go means more better. I also realize that, with enough hacking, it may be possible to add an electric-only mode to the CR-Z. Make it so that the ECU shuts off the engine. For the 6MT, just make the driver keep the car in neutral, and for the CVT, there's no fluid pressure with the engine off so it would disengage automatically. Electric only on the manual would be very janky, but I figure it would be very doable on the CVT. I have thought of lots of things to do to the 'Z, including a fully electric one, but I lack the knowledge, time, tools and money for most of these projects. If I make big money one day I'll surely revisit this.

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yayuuu

· #10 · Oct 30, 2020

MrFastFox666 said:
I think this would be super nice. It would make the CR-Z almost like the NSX, but backwards lol. over 60hp of additional electric power would make an enormous difference on the car, I think. I think that at this point, though, you'd definitely need a higher capacity battery. Maybe you could extend the battery into the trunk. It would likely make the trunk floor taller thus reducing cargo volume, but hey, more go means more better. I also realize that, with enough hacking, it may be possible to add an electric-only mode to the CR-Z. Make it so that the ECU shuts off the engine. For the 6MT, just make the driver keep the car in neutral, and for the CVT, there's no fluid pressure with the engine off so it would disengage automatically. Electric only on the manual would be very janky, but I figure it would be very doable on the CVT. I have thought of lots of things to do to the 'Z, including a fully electric one, but I lack the knowledge, time, tools and money for most of these projects. If I make big money one day I'll surely revisit this.

Well, there's a foam insert in the trunk, I would definitely remove that. Also the cells alone takes only a portion of the battery pack size, there's also a lot of electronics inside. It should be easily possible to fit 2x the amount of battery cells on top of the current battery by just removing the foam insert.
About the electric only - yes, with some hackery it would be possible and I had this in mind, just not for saving fuel but for fun. My idea is to get the S+ button out of the newer version and set it to bypass IMA controller signal and just apply 100% power to the rear motors immediately as long as you are holding it. That should make the rear wheels loose traction at low speeds and drift. Ofc the system should still require the battery to be at least let's say 3 bars, so it won't discharge completly. There's a lot of fun stuff that can be done.

Also I would probably not use the rear motors to recharge the battery, only leave the OEM IMA motor to do it. The thing is, that by default, when I am driving at constant speed, from time to time the IMA decides to recharge the battery slightly (1 bar chrg on the dashboard). When it does that, I can feel the car slowing down slightly and basically with 2 more motors, this effect would be much stronger if they were all linked (but maybe I would just program it to not charge when there's 1 bar on the dash but start charging from 2 bars, that would require more testing).

Yes, the money is a problem, but on the other hand, making the CRZ like NSX in reverse and with a manual transmission, with like 200HP FWD (supercharged) and 60HP RWD would make it so much fun and I think that this is how the car should have been made from the factory. Just so you will know, the chinese electric motors that you can order currently, rated for 24KW of power for up to 30s or 12KW of constant power (air cooled) costs around 3500$ for the set of 2 motors + 2 motor controllers. On top of that you would need battery cells, here in Poland it's possible to buy the whole used CR-Z battery pack for around 750$, so 2 packs are another 1500$ and most likely also some new cells to replace the weakest cells, I would count another 1500$. That makes it cost around 6500$ for the parts only and I expect the Elaphe motors to be way more expensive, because they are lighter, liquid cooled and they have already inthegrated brakes. The chinese motors don't, but you can use them with standard brake rotors ( US $3490.0 |QSMOTOR 24KW E CAR silnik piasty i zestawy do konwersji kontrolerów|Silniki| - AliExpress ).

Also, this mod would actually still save fuel in the city driving, because I would be able to accelerate more using electric power and then capture more power while braking.

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TankZF1

· #11 · Oct 30, 2020

yayuuu said:
Adding rear motors to non-hybrid car might be actually easier, as you don't need to inthegrate it with current sustem, just add separate system that only reads signal from throttle potentiometer. The same can be done to CRZ with separate battery, the only problem is, that it wouldn't show battery level on the main instrument cluster, but you would have a separate screen. That's why I would like to inthegrate it in the current system, which should be possible. The main limiting factor for me currently is the availability of electric motors. There are currently available motors in China, but they are bulky, heavy and would require wide rear fenders. There are few companies who don't sell the motors to individual customers and there are few more still in development. I hope that more products will be available before I start with this project, but as I said, it's more of a future project than current. I'm going for a supercharger next year and few more mods accociated with it, like clutch, exhaust, etc. Only after all of the obvious mods I'll be looking into rear motors more seriously, so as I said, I asked about the library out of curiosity, because it's better to collect as many informations as possible before jumping in. I'm a programmer, but I don't have too much experience with canbus. I only know the basics of how it works, but never tried to decode it. Also, it's not the only way to get the assist/chrg level, you can also add a high current low resistance resistor before the IMA electric motor and measure the voltage drop across the resistor and amplify it with a transistor to get the correct voltage for the external motor controller.

I'm very interested in this. If you cannot use in-wheel motors you a transaxle styly like tesla and other electric cars but you would need new hubs at the least to run a driveshaft through. I think converting to independent rear suspension would be the easiest option as you could use front hub with a lower/upper control arm and a tie rod to triangulate it all.

If you got rid of the twist beam axle there would be space to move the current battery down and forward or use newer and smaller (mine is a 12) lithium ion or use higher kw aftermarket battery to provide more oomph.

Could you use a different battery without the ima having a shit fit?

yayuuu

· #12 · Oct 30, 2020

TankZF1 said:
I'm very interested in this. If you cannot use in-wheel motors you a transaxle styly like tesla and other electric cars but you would need new hubs at the least to run a driveshaft through. I think converting to independent rear suspension would be the easiest option as you could use front hub with a lower/upper control arm and a tie rod to triangulate it all.

If you got rid of the twist beam axle there would be space to move the current battery down and forward or use newer and smaller (mine is a 12) lithium ion or use higher kw aftermarket battery to provide more oomph.

Could you use a different battery without the ima having a shit fit?

Each battery technology have different charging process, so you can't switch it without some more advanced trickery.
Independed suspension would require cutting the whole trunk floor and replacing it with a flat sheet to put a motor in the middle. That would leave less space for the battery. The battery sits directly between the wheels. That's way more than I would ever want to change. Electric stuff is something I can do myself, but cutting and welding is not.

You can use a different battery as long as it's NiMH and you keep the same voltage. You can increase capacity and that also increases maximum current the battery can handle. The IMA alone will not use the additional available current, to do it the motor would have to work with lower resistance. You can however use the additional power to power additional motor. The safe assumption is to add the same amount of cells per 10KW of additional power you want to use.

TankZF1

· #13 · Oct 30, 2020

yayuuu said:
Each battery technology have different charging process, so you can't switch it without some more advanced trickery.
Independed suspension would require cutting the whole trunk floor and replacing it with a flat sheet to put a motor in the middle. That would leave less space for the battery. The battery sits directly between the wheels. That's way more than I would ever want to change. Electric stuff is something I can do myself, but cutting and welding is not.

You can use a different battery as long as it's NiMH and you keep the same voltage. You can increase capacity and that also increases maximum current the battery can handle. The IMA alone will not use the additional available current, to do it the motor would have to work with lower resistance. You can however use the additional power to power additional motor. The safe assumption is to add the same amount of cells per 10KW of additional power you want to use.

Bugger 😬 there is room to move the battery down and forward with the axle removed but those tesla style transaxles are quite large, it would be a tight fit.

What about using another crz motor but mounted centre amd slightly rear of the axle centreline. You'd have to machine a cover for each end with an adapter on both sides of the stator with a splined output to mount driveshafts on both sides.

Still need to modify the rear hubs and axle.

These in wheel electric motors are they encompassed entirely within the wheel?

Do they replace the brakes and use regen for retardation or do the brakes stay put.

TankZF1

· #14 · Oct 30, 2020

Actually my idea above wouldn't work because it cannot account for varying wheel speeds around corners like a differential does.

yayuuu

· #15 · Oct 30, 2020

4

TankZF1 said:
Bugger 😬 there is room to move the battery down and forward with the axle removed but those tesla style transaxles are quite large, it would be a tight fit.

What about using another crz motor but mounted centre amd slightly rear of the axle centreline. You'd have to machine a cover for each end with an adapter on both sides of the stator with a splined output to mount driveshafts on both sides.

Still need to modify the rear hubs and axle.

These in wheel electric motors are they encompassed entirely within the wheel?

Do they replace the brakes and use regen for retardation or do the brakes stay put.

They replace wheel bearings. Elaphe motors have brake rotors inside the assembly. You can see it here:

Chinese motors have brake rotors mounted outside, which makes them more bulky. You can see it on this image:

The shaft inside is connected with stator, the whole outside assembly is a rotor:

They have both, regen and brakes.

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TankZF1

· #16 · Oct 30, 2020

Wow that is cool.

Looks like you can use your original wheels too. This would be amazing for torque vectoring if you could manage the regen in conjunction with the cars yaw sensor you could regen on the outside wheel to counter oversteer and the inside wheel to counter understeer, as you said a baby nsx!!

MrFastFox666

· #17 · Oct 30, 2020

yayuuu said:
Also I would probably not use the rear motors to recharge the battery, only leave the OEM IMA motor to do it. The thing is, that by default, when I am driving at constant speed, from time to time the IMA decides to recharge the battery slightly (1 bar chrg on the dashboard). When it does that, I can feel the car slowing down slightly and basically with 2 more motors, this effect would be much stronger if they were all linked (but maybe I would just program it to not charge when there's 1 bar on the dash but start charging from 2 bars, that would require more testing).

Mine does that too, but its not very consistent. It does it more or less at random. Also, I never feel the car slowing down when it does.

I think that using the rear motors for regen braking would actually be a good idea. I hate how weak the regen is on the 'Z, making efficient driving very tricky. Having stronger regen would be a good thing, especially since you'd have a larger battery that is being drained faster. I doubt the IMA motor on its own could keep it recharged.

Also, I just realized that for an electric-only mode to work, you'd need a vacuum pump for the brake booster. an electric A/C compressor would also be a nice bonus.

PeterPerkins

· #18 · Nov 2, 2020 (Edited)

DaNaoZhong said:
Hi everyone!
I myself don't own an CRZ, but I drive a ZE1 Insight. A friend of mine owns a CRZ, and for fun we had a look at the CAN bus and started to reverse engineer it.
The IMA CAN bus contains all the interesting information you would want to display on your instrument panel, such as IMA battery voltage, state of charge, and IMA current (A).

What do you think? Do such devices to display IMA parameters already exist and I am wasting my time, or would that be a cool project?

In case you are interested in the CAN bit assignment, I uploaded a part of what we have decoded here: Honda CRZ ZE2 CAN Bit Assignment Sheet – texelography

Thank you!

Good idea OP. Clemens from IC?
I've just bought a Nimh CRZ and am converting it to Lithium.
We could talk about the CAN stuff..

KL¥

· #19 · Dec 26, 2020

Spdbump said:
Scan Gauge II » ScanGauge II has the ability to read some of this using their X-Gauge commands but it is dot matrix so fails that requirement. It is a small display unit that plugs directly into ODB II. I have set some of the gauges but the values seem off so maybe the commands do not all work with a 2013 CR-Z EX CVT.

Here is what they claim can be monitored in a Honda Hybrid.

» Honda-Acura

www.scangauge.com

Autel ap200 obd2 bluethoot show all engine and ima livedata +more whit ios/android phone app

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