Back from space dock

The starship is back from space dock... well, OK, from the good folks at Fisker of Vancouver/BMW Store.

Great service again today, thanks to Nick (Mechanic) and Garett (Service Advisor).  I particularly enjoyed my brief chat with Nick just after I rolled the car into the service bay in the morning.  He also provided a full report for me to mull over at the end of the day.  Being a tech guy, I like such engagements to be detailed and informative - engineering (of all kinds) is an honest profession after all :-)

So, apparently the car's BECM (Body Electronic Control Module??) has been reprogrammed with a post-615 software update.  I was told that this should avoid the engine fault flags getting set that were illuminating the engine light (#1 on my 'Rough Edge' list).  On my drive home, I toggled Sports mode a few times, with some decent intervals of Stealth mode.  So far no engine light.  I shall do the same tomorrow morning on a full battery charge, as this may have been the condition of the vehicle when Sports mode seemed to trigger the fault codes before.  We'll see...

Nick et al also had a look at my Touch Screen System (TSS on the report).  I'm told that cases of this sort of display corruption are known, but that my case is rather extreme.  Specific details from my case (essentially the screen images I posted here) are now attachments on a filing to Fisker HQ.  Apparently, as I thought, the issue is promoted by switching screens (which presumably is when texture/display memory is updated for the new screen).  With this report into Fisker, it is now clearly a waiting game to see what resolution they might come up with for this defect.  I'm somewhat concerned that my experience should be worse than the general case, as these touch screen modules ought to have no variance in hardware.  This isn't like 'tolerances' in physical systems were you can expect a certain limited range of experiences.  Unless other people are actually seeing exactly the same effects (albeit random), my money would be on a dodgy display memory or graphics subsystem.  Anyway, there's due process for the technical people to properly digest and diagnose all this first.

While I was there, I also mentioned the poor Bluetooth handsfree phone streaming audio (with various audible digital artifacts), the apparently inoperable Solar Energy screen and the intermittent cabin set up issue.  All of these are apparently 'known issues', which I had already understood from other sources.

Aside from actual vehicle stuff, today I decided to endow the Red Carmelon with its own wireless hotspot.  I've heard that in-car wifi is beginning to make an appearance as a standard feature in some models, but the 2012 Karma isn't quite on that list.  However, thanks to an amazing little Sierra Wireless device, high-speed internet connection is possible while out and about with an LTE to wifi bridge.

LTE - 802.11 bridge (actual size)

This little device sits perfectly in the centre console storage compartment, where it can be plugged directly into power too, in order to get charged whenever the vehicle's electrical systems are powered up.  It has its own lithium ion battery - good for 6 hours usage.  While Karma does seem to be an electrically/RF noisy environment, as is obvious by occasional motor noise audible over weak radio signals, I doubt this will be an issue at the microwave frequencies of either LTE or 802.11 wifi.  I'll have to road test this with a passenger browsing the net while cruising around.

I have plans for a Raspberry Pi project that could also eventually be situated in the centre console compartment, joining this networking hardware... but I have to get a hold of a 'Raspi' unit first, and they seem to be like gold dust at the moment.

Another patch

Starship Red Carmeleon is in for another patch tomorrow.
It has been suggested to me that this one might fix the engine light issue, which would be nice of course.

Meanwhile, I took a quick snap of the vehicle location marker while out driving on Sunday:

As you can see, it has a square mask visible around it.  I'm not sure if this is the same texture corruption issue I've already noted, or some other artifact.

Rough-edge Roundup #1

I thought I would summarize the small issues and niggles that I'm personally aware of.  I fully expect to have these dealt with over time with software patches (at least) and I intend to keep a running tally as things are fixed or new issues become apparent.  It's possible that some of these are unique to my vehicle (i.e. tolerances/configuration or parts that may need replacing), but in any case we'll see.  I'm certainly curious whether anyone else has experienced these particular problems.

At this time, I'm tracking the following issues (most to least serious):

• Engine light illuminated
  This is allegedly caused by "multiple fault flags" (according to the last mechanic report).  When cleared, these seem to reappear when I next engage Sports mode, but perhaps anytime the ICE is primed to fire up.  The engine does start however and seems to reduce, though not entirely eliminate, battery consumption (while the battery is in the mid-range of charge) - which I believe is correct.
• Touch screen corruption (display textures) after navigating between screens
  Looks like a memory management or corruption issue (main or display memory), where some of the graphical textures used get overwritten with random memory.  This can make screens look pretty nasty, but seems not to have any functional effect. 
• The Solar Energy screen seems inoperable
  Mine seems to be stuck on March and there's no way to change to any day/month/year as is suggested in the manual.  I've seen on a YouTube video that someone posted that this screen doesn't work for them either.
• The Delay Lock feature refuses to stay in the "ON" setting
  Every time I turn this on, I will find it reverted to being off when I next enter the vehicle (i.e. when the power is cycled).  Either this parameter is not being flashed into non-volatile memory correctly, or there's a logical bug in the software.
• Intermittent failure to configure car (e.g. set seat position, radio etc.) when ignition to on/acc
  Occasionally, turning the vehicle on does not result in correct cabin set up.  This might be related to where I used to store the second key fob (possibly in range of the vehicle).  I've since moved the key and am keeping an eye on the situation.
• Bluetooth handsfree audio quality is poor
  The system is usable, but suffers from discernible streaming errors with the received audio data piped to the cabin speakers.  No idea what the microphone pickup in the car is like.  I'm able to make myself understood on calls, but I'll have to perform some proper tests to hear for myself.

Also, I have the following wish list (no particular order):

• I haven't found a good way to mute the music (radio, satellite, USB etc.) separate from the master volume.
  This is a problem because I often want to manually mute/turn off music but still have navigation voice cues, phone calls etc. have an appropriate volume.  There's a hokey way of doing this by selecting AUX as the source.  It seems like we're missing one soft button on the audio screen.
• Faster touch screen (loading songs, etc.)
  Whatever embedded processor or system on a chip is running the touch screen system is pretty slow and/or the software isn't written to allow background tasks to work without affecting the user experience.  There are definitely moments when the system is busy and there's no feedback at all for the user.  Also, reading my large USB music directory can take a long while before they are accessible.  It would be nice if this could be speeded up.
• Most songs copied from my iTunes library play fine.  Occasionally however, I find a song that refuses to play.  I have no idea what the difference is!
• A much faster way to scroll through long lists would be good (music, contacts) etc.  Maybe buttons to jump quickly to initial letters (e.g. jump quickly to the "Ts").
• It would be nice if the audio system would store the last track played on the USB and resume from there next time the system is started.  Instead it seems to revert to the beginning each time when playing sequentially.  That's a bit unfriendly, especially as the USB music only becomes available after compiling the directory, usually once you're a minute or so down the road and can't easily interact with the audio system.

A glittering gallery

Some more pictures...

"Diamond Dust" in 3D (!)

Glint

Aggressive, stable stance.  Nice hips ;-)

Flowing lines

Wink!

In its habitat

Sunbathing... and recharging

Sun kiss on the Fisker logo

It bites!

It bites! (close-up) 

The Red Carmeleon stare

In vernal inferno

A first full weekend

I grabbed a few minutes in to play with the navigation system today.  It didn't take long to actually figure out why I was not able to find some streets like "W 5th Avenue".  The problem was that the system offered me "Greater Vancouver - New Westminster" to begin with in the selections across the top of the nav system.  In my previous rush to enter an address while stopped at a red light, I had read the "Greater Vancouver" bit and accepted that district.  I think the initial city/districts offered are just the last recently used.  Now that I've entered a Vancouver address, the system seems to offer this district too.  It might be nice if it offered the area in which the car resides when you turn it on, and then others from the last recently used list.  The main thing however, is that I figured out my prior confusion which was, typically, down to user error :-)

In fact, entering a split East/West street is much easier than I found this to be in the Audi (I'm not a big fan of the rotary input methods like in the Audi, BMW, Acura etc.), so I much prefer the Karma's touch screen (which my GS Lexus had a few years back too).  In the Karma, entering "5" with a trailing space or "th" will straight away offer "W 5th Avenue" and "E 5th Avenue" as selectable options.  Very good.  Also, entering "W 5" and then space or "th" will similarly home in on the right street for selection. Entering "West" doesn't work in the same way, which I'm sure is by design.  The system seems to expect a street name containing "West" in this case, whereas it is presumably aware of short compass cardinal point letters as a prefix convention for these split streets.

The screen corruption (texture) problem remains an issue, as reported in an earlier post.  It seems to be a memory management issue as you can see different corruption has you move around the interface and sometimes previously corrupted screens will fix themselves.

Here are a couple of examples of the Climate screen, with and then without corruption.  This is a case where the corruption appeared after using the interface for a bit, then disappeared on this screen again later.

Note the specking around the circular graphic in the lower image.  In this case, the corruption was mild, but by contrast here are a couple of other screens, with much more obvious issues:

The last image has the speckling on some text above and left of centre in the image (on the green background) rendering it unreadable.  

As surmised yesterday, the reason why the auto mirror retraction hadn't worked was because the setting  had been reset in the configuration screen.  There could be various reasons for this, but I've put it back to automatic folding and it seems to be working again as desired.

One new thing I seem to be having trouble with is the "Delay Lock" setting.  This is supposed to automatically lock the vehicle after a certain period if the vehicle is unlocked from the key fob but not actually accessed.  That seemed like a useful setting, at least to experiment with.  However, I can't seem to make this setting stick.  I configured this to be set "on" and then leave and lock the vehicle for a while.  When I return however, I see that the setting is reset to "off".  It's not a biggie of course, but certainly a curiosity.  

While I'm talking about glitches in automobile control systems, the Audi R8 had a few that I would see from time to time, also I think related to initialization when the ignition was set to On/Acc.  One of these was that some radio mode would become unavailable, or the whole radio off or uncontrollable until the vehicle power was cycled.  That happened about a dozen times in 2 years, so a fairly low occurrence.  A similar condition was the rear spoiler getting fully or partly deployed and then being uncontrollable.  There's a console button to control this, but in the aberrant condition, this would do absolutely nothing until you had also stopped the vehicle and cycled the power.  This condition occurred about three times in 2 years.  The nice thing about the Fisker is that all (or at least a lot) of the firmware appears to be upgradable.  Aside from navigation systems, and probably only the databases at that, you never really hear of production vehicles getting upgrades to system software in general.  Of course, you can make arguments for and against this in terms of the features and quality of a vehicle's systems over its lifetime of 10 years max.  However...

We do live in times where things move really fast. So if it's increasingly possible to build vehicles as 'hardware platforms' (with propulsion, energy management, instrumentation, climate control, driver aids, navigation, networking, device integration and other cabin features) then perhaps the era when we can expect feature evolution over the lifetime of a vehicle is upon us.

A shining chariot

Some more pictures today, as it's Friday and for the first time in a while I'm not flying anywhere this weekend, so had a little time to catch my breath and grab a few snaps.

I still haven't had this car long enough to take those beautiful lines for granted!

In other news:

• I've noticed that the automatic mirror folding setting seems to have reset (or at least that my mirrors aren't folding automatically!).  Perhaps this is the result of the software patching done yesterday resetting some parameter memory... or maybe the garage mechanic turned this off for some reason.  I'll investigate tomorrow.
• I've had one more instance of the car not being set up correctly (particularly seat settings) when the accessory mode was entered on entering the vehicle.  So, I think this remains an intermittent issue.  On the occasions that this happens, it's a simple matter of cycling the ignition state (two presses of the ignition button).  
• My timing in getting the car 'patched' with new software yesterday was evidently poor as I was told today by the dealership that there was another patch released today.  Actually, that's no problem for me as the dealership is only 10 minutes from my place of work, and I'm also told that the process only takes 20 minutes.  I'm going to try to see if the mechanics would mind me watching while they perform the update when I take the car in (hopefully Monday)... I'm curious to see that process in action. 

I'm looking forward to spending more quality time (!) with the Red Carmeleon over the weekend, and getting more familiar with some of the features - such as the navigation system.

A-ccomplishment

Back from my travels I arranged to have the Red Carmeleon looked at by the Fisker Folks (Fisker of Vancouver) to investigate the lit engine light and a couple of other items mentioned here: the poor AM reception and the intermittent failure to set up the vehicle according to the settings set on the key fob.

Collecting the car, I was told the AM radio reception was nominal.  That's a shame because it is much poorer than my old Audi, and I'm sure the pickup of the electric motor whine on the radio is worsened by the lack of signal received at the radio.  Anyway, I'm pretty convinced this is a design issue now.  I'm sure AM reception wasn't the #1 priority for Fisker - and to be fair the rest of the audio system is great.  I just happen to like to listen to the local AM news radio station, so I guess I'm just going to have to get used to listening to hiss and motor whine.

The mechanic checking the intermittent non-set up of the vehicle on power-on, also could not reproduce the problem.  However, there is an interesting note on the service report indicating "Non operation is the result of software and cannot be addressed at this time".  That's probably a general note in relation to some other similar reports into Fisker, I'm guessing.  Anyway, this seems to only happen occasionally, so I'm cool for now.  As a software guy, I'd suggest a race condition in the startup routine of the vehicle occasionally causes this set up to fail or be missed out.

On the main subject of the engine light, the service report indicates that the vehicle had flagged multiple errors.  The report actually says "Updated software in PIMGEN, TM1, TM2 with software released after 615.  Filed TSS case #5545".  Being a technical guy, I'm pretty fascinated by this car and therefore by these subsystem abbreviations.  I will guess that TM1 and TM2 refer to "Transaxle Motors" as that seems reasonable for an electric car.  Not sure what a PIMGEN is though.  Programmable Interface Module for the Generator?... probably not.

While the guys were at it, they saw fit to replace the "wiper cowl" as it was "deformed".  I hadn't noticed anything awry, but it's nice to see proactive remediation!  Not sure whether this was something they just noticed, or perhaps something on Fisker's 'watch list', presuming something like that exists.

This was my first experience of the Fisker of Vancouver / BMW Store service department.  I have to say they did themselves proud.  Garett the Service Advisor was very welcoming, friendly and helpful.  I got to meet the Fisker mechanics and was introduced to the reception staff.  I had coffee, was offered a breakfast muffin and was then straight away whisked to my place of work.
Overall, this now rates as my best experience at a dealership service centre in Vancouver... a place previously held by Pattison Lexus when they opened, though unfortunately the quality there dropped noticeably over time.  I have to say that Capilano Audi never distinguished themselves in my opinion.
The car was very nicely valeted (including inside) when I collected it.  I wonder if this level of service will persist, but they've certainly made a great impression to begin with.

It was great to drive the car again after a few days' hiatus.  It really is a beautiful car and an awesome drive.  I cranked the audio system up a bit, listening to my USB drive tunes.  The late afternoon sun peeked out and the car felt like a great place to be.  I also finally got to see a feature of car for the first time: the cool hyper-modern analogue clock that is displayed in the dash.  This is evidently removed if the car is displaying a critical warning light (like the engine warning that I previously had permanently displayed).

Getting home I attempted what I think is the last little piece of set up.  I hate setting up HomeLink transmitters as they're always a bit of a pain.  The Fisker manual was fairly clear though, and despite incorrect instructions on the back of the overhead drive unit/door lifter in my garage, I managed to get the Fisker HomeLink system to work correctly after only about 10 minutes of fiddling.

The only component of the vehicle's system I still feel I need some practice with is the navigation system.  I also need to reset the address book and reload it from my iPhone (as noted before I think messing around with my iPhone's iCloud settings has caused multiple copies of phone book entries to be sent and stored in the Karma).  Might have some time for these tomorrow evening.