After my first failed attempts at riding 1.000 km in a day I started looking at how fast I should ride, given my bike’s specs. If you consider consumption at speed X, maximum battery capacity and charge power a constant value you can calculate ride and charge speed and do so for a few scenario’s (=speeds). I thus realized riding at around 100 kph should be ideal.
Recently Stéphane Melançon released his spreadsheet that does all this and way more. With a few simple input values and a set of calculations the spreadsheet would figure out what the optimal speed is for your setup. When he shared this file he also explained having an app to do so would be awesome.
And that is where I jumped in. I created a simple app containing his formulas and released a few test versions for Stéphane to check out. It’s still in beta and for now only for Android. If you want you can test along and suggest your own improvements.
https://play.google.com/apps/testing/be.hcpl.android.optitripev
For those that know their way around kotlin or Java code there is also this project website where code is shared. Stéphane was very clear from the start that this should be free and open source.
https://bitbucket.org/cappelleh/optitrip-ev-android/src/develop/
Oh and I did try it out with values that fit my Energica setup. If I use a 20 kW constant charge speed, a 16 kWh battery capacity, an 80% charge target and 1.000 km distance I get a very optimistic 110 kph optimal riding speed.
The issue here is at that speed I’ll never be able to keep charging at 20 kW. Correcting for that by either targetting only 50% battery capacity (or charge target) or 16 kW charge speed gets me to a more realistic 100 kph. We’ll see how close I can get on my next attempt.
Next steps for the app are :
- Make an iOS version
- Allow for faster input with vehicle profile
- Support imperial units
- Support correction factor in config