Logging Electric Vehicle Charging Data From Nissan EV (SoC%)

TRL

About: TRL provides research, technology and software solutions for surface transport modes and related markets engaged in intelligent, new mobility innovations.

What problem did you solve?

We are using a Nissan e-NV200 as a data gathering platform. We needed to be able to record the activity on the multiple CAN buses to supplement the data gathered from the many other sensors. State of Charge (SoC) was the driving factor (which we decoded from the EVCAN), but we also decoded vehicle speed and wheel speed from the CarCAN.

How did you solve it?

We used the CANedge2 to record both the standard CANbus and EV CANbus simultaneously by using a splitter on the OBD2 port and re-wiring a DB9 cable appropriately for the EV CAN bus pins. To decode the data, we used a Google sheets workbook from a Nissan Leaf forum. The e-NV200 CAN bus encoding fortunately seems to be very similar to the Nissan Leaf.

For example, SoC was available on CAN ID 55B, bits 0 to 10. For a CAN frame with payload b2c0aa00e58013a8, we took the first 10 bits (1011001011), converted this to decimal (715) and applied a scaling factor of 0.001 to get the percentage charge remaining (71.5%). [CSS comment: You can also find various Nissan EV DBC files here].

Electric Vehicle State of Charge CAN DBC Logger

What benefit has this led to?

The device provided us with a straightforward and reliable means of gathering the data. The removable memory card proved to be especially helpful at the end of a day of testing.

"I have found the CANedge2 to be an effective device that is accompanied by impressive support from its creators"

Why did you choose the CANedge?

The excellent guides on the CSS Electronics website first caught my attention. I tried out a CL2000 and was impressed by its performance. Our subsequent need to record multiple CAN buses made a CANedge2 an worthwhile upgrade.

— Adam G, Integration Engineer,

Comments by CSS Electronics

With the rise of electric vehicles, we see a growing demand for collecting EV charging data (i.e. state of charge, SoC).

The CANedge can be used to log both raw CAN data from EVs, as well as send custom CAN frames. The latter is important as many EV signals require UDS requests (Unified Diagnostic Services) to be recorded.

However, a challenge is that data from electric vehicles is proprietary - meaning that you'll need to either 1) reverse engineer the data, 2) utilize existing public databases with decoding rules or 3) get the decoding rules from the OEM.

For more details, see our intro to EV data logging, which also contains an overview of public electric vehicle DBC files.