OVMS for the Kia Soul EV (to remotely access it without UVO)

PrivatePilot · May 14, 2019

JejuSoul said:
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Not all the codes on these cars are the same. But yes most are.
As far as I know no one is using the OVMS app on the I oniq.
Unless you are willing and able to do some development work to fix any problems, I would not recommend OVMS for the current I oniq.

Why would you recommend against using it? And what do you think won't work? As I understand it the worst that can happen is the CANbus receives a command it doesn't like or understand and just ignores it....?

I've looked at EVNotify but it doesn't do much compared to OVMS, and from what I've read since it's mostly simple OBD vs CANbus based once the OBD side of things goes to sleep after the car has been turned off, it disconnects and becomes useless. I'll look at it some more, but aside from seeing SOC via Bluetooth (another limiting factor) it's very limited compared to the connectivity and features of OVMS.

JejuSoul · May 14, 2019

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The codes we know that are working on the I oniq are for the Battery Management System. You can view these by buying a much cheaper 0BD2 Bluetooth adapter.

OVMS offers the potential for much more, but it costs more and for the I oniq we don't know that the features you want are actually working. I agree that nothing is likely to go wrong, but it is possible that you will be disappointed.

EVNotify is the only app that I know of that was developed on the I oniq. For the Soul EV we have Torque, SoulEVSpy and OVMS. All should work on both cars but someone needs to test it.

notfred · May 15, 2019

While it is unlikely, any time you are sending commands on the CAN bus, either from an OBDII connection or more directly connected, there is a possibility of serious problems.

Kia have not released documentation on the CAN bus commands, the community has reverse engineered them. This means that we may be wrong and we could be sending dangerous commands. Remember that everything is there, brakes, steering, accelerator etc.

During development one person fired random commands to see what happened and ended up with their heating system convinced that the cabin was below freezing and running full blast. Even after turning it off and back on again it persisted and they had to get the dealer to reprogram the system.

The risk is low running these things now that other people have developed them and tried them out without seeing any issues, but it isn't zero.

There is also an additional security risk any time you add an Internet connection to the CAN bus, see the Jeep hack from a few years ago.

PrivatePilot · May 18, 2019

Gotcha.

Is there a list of currently functioning commands on the Kia? The one we miss most is remote precondition. The whole "set a time and the car will precondition itself" thing is fine I guess (It's the same on the Ioniq as it is on the Soul), but there's plenty of scenarios when my wife used to preconditon the Volt (IE, 5-10 minutes before she'd leave her office in the winter for the drive home) outside of the normally scheduled thing.

Remote monitoring of charging, SOC, etc etc is more for my interest vs my wife, but if precondition is something that will eventually become a thing, I can sell the whole system to her and she'd like that back.