ElectricMotorcycleForum.com

This was livestreamed this afternoon. I noticed about 15 minutes in and watched it fully:
-


The audience questions were all typical (and good, just easy for me to predict having been in this space for a few years), and I think his answers were mostly helpful.
- He did dance around battery research, aside from sensibly downplaying supercapacitors and graphite engineering changes, since they aren't production ready. I wonder what he was avoiding saying, although he did admit they're lagging a bit in their regular density updates.
- He highlighted the change in Zero marketing from being a purely budgetary/rational decision to an emotion-first message, which sounds pretty sensible to me (use the budgetary analysis to justify buying the bike you like, rather than expecting you to like a bike with a specific spreadsheet outcome).
- He definitely stuck with a line I've heard before and used, which is that to get the bike price down, the battery price and scale are the key factors; he later discussed how production scaling in the last year has been a nice problem to have, but sort of hinted that it's scary not being able to get the bikes out fast enough once the market comes to your door (so to speak).


I'm an adventure-ish rider but I don't find the Black Forest as compelling as some, apparently. I want to solve range/aerodynamics before trying to get out there fully.


Anyway, that's what I got out of an hour's discussion.

Cross-post from FB: https://www.facebook.com/groups/zmcowners/permalink/2845943378808185/

Greg Hassler just posted a YouTube video guide to rear shock removal for Gen2 (DS/DSR specifically) models!


The unofficial manual has a rough guide for this procedure, but the video definitely highlights some not-so-subtle challenges with this task. I’ve added to the article and will work on updating the text as appropriate soon.
 https://zeromanual.com/wiki/Rear_Shock_Removal

Now, this is relatively premature, but I've embarked on making a manual for the SRF owners and upcoming SRS owners. Honestly, I intend to be an SRS owner, but I'm not ready for a new bike because I still have some surgery that will keep me at home for another few weeks. I've amassed enough photos and documentation that I can try to make a reasonable manual to start with.


So, here's the main document:
https://zeromanual.com/wiki/FST_Platform/Unofficial_Service_Manual
And here's the full listing of articles:
https://zeromanual.com/wiki/FST_Platform


I'm going to start with just focusing on the structure and layout of the bikes, and the logic of working with them. It's going to be light on the deep technical stuff for a while until I can get hands-on with one, of course, but hopefully someone I can visit a nearby (SF Bay Area) owner soon to poke around (volunteers are welcome to message or email me).


Keep your expectations low, please, because it took about a year for the original manual to become truly useful (2016-2017 timeframe) and another year for me to rework the site to support all these different models and configurations over the years, without duplicating big chunks of content about the battery and so on. On the other hand, I know way more about Zero and bike hardware than I did a few years ago, just as an outcome of the interview and learning process developing the site.


If you can give me an idea of what would be important to see first, I'd appreciate that, in terms of broad goals. Remember also that you, too, can contribute and I'd like to see that happen again now that I'm done wrangling the site so hard it seemed to confuse contributors (although no one did any bad edits at all).

So, after a ton of work I've been detailing in another thread, I created a rough and mostly-acceptable XMX (FX/FXS) manual in a few minutes!
For context: https://www.electricmotorcycleforum.com/boards/index.php?topic=9644


I copied the existing Unofficial Service Manual page content into a new page and rolled up sections with SDS/XMX splits to just handle XMX. I added a few new sections that don't exist yet for XMX parts and procedures.


I think overall this does highlight what I thought might arise as issues for XMX owners trying to use the manual for their own purposes, but now you can fill in new sections quickly without engaging in the large-scale edits I've had to manage myself.


Anyway, here it is, and I would like feedback or assistance from FX/FXS owners:
https://zeromanual.com/wiki/XMX_Platform/Unofficial_Service_Manual

In the course of working on a project, I realized I needed to finish an idea I've been hacking on for a while, to turn Zero logs into a tabular format that can be processed by commodity software into data visualizations and analytics.


Zero logs are just event sequences, so right now this is a bit rough: battery data only shows up on events from the BMS, and ride data are on separate events. So it doesn't plot easily yet, but the CSV/TSV formats are working well and I pull out all of the columns that Zero puts into "key: value key: value" sequences, and categorize the events and their attributes.



https://github.com/zero-motorcycle-community/zero-log-data-extractor


Here's some example output:

entry,timestamp,component,event_type,event,PackTemp (h),PackTemp (l),Vpack,BattAmps,MotTemp,AmbTemp,vmod,minsys,vcap,MinCell,PackSOC,MbbChgEn,serial,Error Code,Bmvolts,Amps
1,2018-05-21 21:12:20,MBB,,Disarmed,21,20,113.044,2,26,20,,,,,,,,,,
2,2018-05-13 10:06:37,Controller,,Sevcon CAN Link Down,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
3,2018-05-13 10:06:38,Controller,,Sevcon CAN Link Up,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
4,2018-05-13 10:06:40,MBB,,Contactor Welded,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
5,2018-05-13 10:06:40,Controller,OFF,Sevcon Turned Off,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
6,2018-05-13 10:06:42,Controller,ON,Sevcon Turned On,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
7,2018-05-13 10:06:42,Controller,,Sevcon CAN Link Down,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
8,2018-05-13 10:06:43,Controller,,Sevcon CAN Link Up,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
9,2018-05-13 10:06:43,Controller,DEBUG,Sevcon Contactor Drive ON.,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
10,2018-05-13 10:06:43,BMS,,Module 00,,,,,,,93.175,93.197,86.75,,,,,,,
11,2018-05-13 10:06:43,BMS,DEBUG,Module 00 Contactor is now Closed,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
12,2018-05-13 10:06:43,MBB,INFO, Enabling External Chg 0 Charger 2,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
13,2018-05-13 10:10:25,MBB,DISCONNECTED,External Chg 0 Charger 2 Disconnected,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
14,2018-05-13 10:10:25,BMS,DEBUG,Module scheme changed from Charging mode to Stopped mode,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
15,2018-05-13 10:10:25,BMS,DEBUG,Module mode Change Does Not Require Disconnect,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
16,2018-05-13 10:10:32,BMS,DEBUG,Module scheme changed from Stopped mode to Running mode,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
17,2018-05-13 10:10:32,BMS,DEBUG,Module mode Change Does Not Require Disconnect,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
18,2018-05-13 10:10:35,MBB,RIDING,Riding,37,36,93.271,1,43,18,,,,,,,,,,
19,2018-05-13 10:10:35,MBB,,Batt Dischg Cur Limited,,,,,,,,,,3.28,,,,,,
20,2018-05-13 10:10:42,BMS,DEBUG,Module scheme changed from Running mode to Stopped mode,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
21,2018-05-13 10:10:42,BMS,DEBUG,Module mode Change Does Not Require Disconnect,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
22,2018-05-13 10:11:04,MBB,CONNECTED,External Chg 0 Charger 2 Connected,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
23,2018-05-13 10:11:04,BMS,DEBUG,Module scheme changed from Stopped mode to Charging mode,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
24,2018-05-13 10:11:04,BMS,DEBUG,Module mode Change Does Not Require Disconnect,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
25,2018-05-13 10:11:04,MBB,INFO, Disabling External Chg 0 Charger 2,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
26,2018-05-13 10:11:05,MBB,INFO, Enabling External Chg 0 Charger 2,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
27,2018-05-13 10:11:15,MBB,CHARGING,Charging,37,36,,-63,,,,,,,9%,Yes,,,,
28,2018-05-13 10:11:55,MBB,OFF,Key Off,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
29,2018-05-13 10:21:15,MBB,CHARGING,Charging,37,36,,-86,,,,,,,21%,Yes,,,,
30,2018-05-13 10:31:15,MBB,CHARGING,Charging,38,37,,-86,,,,,,,32%,Yes,,,,
31,2018-05-13 10:41:15,MBB,CHARGING,Charging,39,38,,-83,,,,,,,44%,Yes,,,,
32,2018-05-13 10:51:15,MBB,CHARGING,Charging,42,40,,-82,,,,,,,55%,Yes,,,,
33,2018-05-13 11:01:15,MBB,CHARGING,Charging,44,43,,-78,,,,,,,66%,Yes,,,,


What I'll try to do next is segment the data where there are charge sequences and ride sequences, so that the events are somewhat blended or interpolated. At the very least, each charge section and ride section could get an identifier so it's easier to extract one sequence and plot or analyze that, without writing a lot of time-range logic.


Any comments/suggestions?

This is just a general notice about the plan I'm intending to carry out, after months of gathering of notes, reading professional texts on technical writing, reviewing other motorcycle service manuals, and finally a very generous invitation to Zero headquarters to sit with the service team and go over the bike and its systems.

The unofficial manual's structure is a long and complex topic that's not really fit for a forum; I basically have to undertake an effort to keep it manageable, and unfortunately, I can't do this by committee, although I really want to make sure you can contribute. I intended to put out some polling about the ideas, but really the best feedback I can take will only happen once this effort is mostly complete, when people complain about how to find things, hopefully.

Problems
I intend to address the problems presented by having a new platform for the SR/F, which happen to reflect issues the manual has had covering the FX model's platform and the pre-2013 models.

So, the main problem with content around all of these motorcycle models is that they’re all different and yet share a lot. Some are different in small ways (FX vs FXS - same platform), and some are really big (SRF buswork and cabling are just hugely different from everything we’ve seen, mostly improved with some tradeoffs).

So far, I’ve just made a single-article service manual that is just gargantuan (700kb of HTML alone when I save it to disk). If I try making a PDF with my browser, about 60 pages are guaranteed (probably 80 pages with book-oriented formatting), and I’m sure it’d be a lot higher if I weren’t trying to keep that article from overloading my mobile phone browser when I need to look something up.

We have the same issue with the big aftermarket page, where some entries are for some platforms but not others, and you have to know the outline to figure out where to look.

And I’ll admit very easily that it’s hard to find things on the site. I’ve done my best to make the search bar work, but most people probably don’t realize it’s there or if they do, don’t trust it to work well. And I can never guess how someone’s going to think to themselves before looking.

Anyway, if I continue my current strategy and just jam in the SRF, it’s going to get totally out of control and confusing, and any further model just compounds that.

Solutions
First, I'm committing at least for now to not moving any of the current content around. This is difficult, but it means all the S/DS and X owners don’t have to follow the new content pattern until Google indexes it right and all of the front page gets sorted.

What I will do is to silently pull all the parts of the service manual into separate articles, and silently compose the service manual from those pages. I’ve been doing this for over a year, partly so I can load a single procedure onto my phone and use it in my garage. Here’s a directory of those procedure pages:
https://zeromanual.com/wiki/Category:Procedure

If you look at a procedure, sometimes you’ll get a variant of 2013-2014 bikes in there, or X vs SDS written out in different steps. Inserting SRF information in there is where this turns into trouble.

If I put the battery into a separate article, I’d have a similar problem.

So, there’s a technical part of this plan where I break out articles into separate composed articles that each might be specific to a platform or a series of years or such. I’ll probably have to use a lot of prefixes like “2013-2014”, “SDS”, or “XMX”. I settled in on "Gen1", "Gen2", and "Gen3" where something was shared between platforms.

So, here are some component pages to give an idea of how it will split out the manual:
https://zeromanual.com/wiki/Category:Component

Finally, there will be multiple service manuals, as required. Probably one for SDS, one for XMX, and one for FST, (or Gen1, Gen2, and Gen3!) and each will have areas of variation, but this is a practical decision to make these reasonable to read and not too large.

I’ll pull out the FST manual first, since that requires the least amount of work, and then I’ll cross-tie it with the existing content as necessary, and make articles that tie everything together across models as required. But eventually the FX and FXS will have their own manual, more or less. It won't be perfect, but it'll be easier to find things hopefully.

I think one big challenge will be making sure that owners know where to go from the front page. This is really difficult no matter how you slice it, and I'm not exactly clear on what I'll do, but it's definitely on my mind. I want users to use the search function, but right now this doesn't seem very common, for probably good reasons around the huge articles.

I'm not even sure what I want to ask from forum members. The wiki is designed so that you can contribute, which means adding pages, text, photos, etc., but I can't figure out how to share in the architecture planning, so I'll keep guiding it myself until someone steps up to collaborate at that level.

Early last year (April 2018), my 2016 DSR's onboard charger (Calex / GreenWattPower EVC 1300), after 31000 miles. Prior to that, my DC-DC converter failed and I replaced it myself.

I had the money at the time to upgrade my DigiNow V1 tank installation to a V2 pan installation, and took the opportunity to disassemble the onboard charger for the benefit of the community, to understand the nature of at least one onboard failure, and hopefully shed light on other instances of this vexing problem.

I've published my findings to the unofficial manual wiki as a separate page. It is currently unlinked, because it's a touchy topic. https://zeromanual.com/wiki/Calex_Charger_Teardown

For what it's worth, I decided to disclose this because I hope (and predict without any confirmation other than inference from the teasers) that the coming SR/F model and its platform will no longer equip this Calex model. Also, I wanted to get this information out of my extensive private notes so that the knowledge would not go stale.