1st Major issue with Mia

Ok so after a hard frost recently (~two weeks ago) Mia refused to start, this has happened before and my normal workaround is to swap cars with my partner for that day, after the sun warms Mia she is ready for School pickup. Annoying but not critical.

However on this day the normal warmup did not work and after some investigation the Mia shows the STOP and Warning light along with the Flashing battery light, I spent a frustrating evening proving that Mia was apparently Dead!

Much Forum searching commenced, the main forum for Mia Electric cars are here

http://www.vehiculeselectriques.fr/mia-electric-f69.html The French one

https://www.goingelectric.de/forum/mia-electric The German one

After much searching I found this page

http://4elkaar.eu/mia-electric

Which states

“Do you need help with the electrical maintenance of your MIA Electric?

Each other tries to help you as well as possible in making a diagnosis and you can accompany a possible repair.

Following the bankruptcy of the French manufacturer MIA electric, the termination of the activities of both the Dutch importer Still and garage Weerheim 4kaar has established a support center in the North Holland Oostknollendam, about 20 km above Amsterdam. Both for diagnosis and repair there is access to the expertise of Jacobi Mainz  and the French MIA-electric interest association Collectif MIA

4 can also visit you on request.

Do it yourself?

This Excell error tree helps the layman step by step to find out why the MIA does not start anymore. In addition to the documents from the library of the  Collectif MIA , a layout of the relay panel BR01 , behind the fuse box cover, and the panel BFR01 , under the right-hand rear seat , is also helpful.

For contact you can call or use the contact form.

Also read the News section for more information.”

So I contacted 4elkaar on the email info@4elkaar.eu using his contact form.

He very swiftly and helpfully responded with this

“Hello Graham,

Sorry to hear your MIA is in trouble. But so far I never witnessed a case which could not been solved.  I understand that the BMS and traction battery are ok and > 13V,3 is available when the start key is in position 1 (WRIGHT?) , so that is the good news!

R1708 should close if:

The start key is in position 2, EGV connector X5 pin 23 E_+DEM turns from LOW to HIGH. You can check this.

And

if the brake  pedal signals to EGV it is activated, EGV connector X5 pin 9 E_APPUI_FREINS (Travail) turns from HIGH to LOW and  EGV connector X5 pin 15 E_APPUI_FREINS_2 (Repos) turns from LOW to HIGH. You can check this.

And

BVR communicate by CAN-bus the side doors are closed (and BMS must switch to RUN-state). This requires the CAN- diagnose device to check. But first check the door sensors. BVS connector E_PorteG_ouverte pin 8 turns from HIGH to LOW and BVS connector E_PorteD_ouverte pin 9 turns from HIGH to LOW. You can check this.

I hope the cause hides behind one of these contacts because that is what you can solve without the diagnose equipment.

Is there a possibility to diagnose your car?  If not I can come over if you are willing to take care of the travel fee, a place to stay and a small payment for labour.

Please keep me in touch. Do not hesitate to ask any further.

Succes!

Jos Ouwehand”

Thanks Jos. What an amazingly helpful chap, so this set me on the warpath to a solution, and my initial suspect was the 12v circuit even though all the indications were normal for 12v electrics, lights all work, wipers work etc. however I thought at first that maybe the 5 year old (end of life) 12v battery was at fault and so removed it for charging.

After a quick check on the manufacturers specifications it seemed apparent that you should not charge these sealed gel type batteries at 12A (Fast charge) so I stuck to 2A and left it going for a day, the next day and the problem had vanished.

Great I thought and promptly purchased a new 12V battery from the web to get exactly the same type (tiny 17A 12V service battery).

I drove the car normally that day and brought it home as usual and put it back on charge at the end of the day as normal, the next morning however the problem had returned, assuming that this old 12V battery was on its last legs and was not holding a charge I put it down to waiting for the new one to arrive, a couple of days later it did arrive and I gleefully fitted it to the car expecting to have solved the issue.

Damn! Same problem, so I thought that maybe this new 12V battery has been sat on a shelf somewhere for several years and maybe it just needs a full charge, So I removed the new 12v battery and put it on a 2A charge, a day later it was still charging and I began to suspect that I may not be putting enough charge in it at 2A trickle charge and so did another more general web search on charging sealed gel type 12V batteries at 12A and found this.

https://www.powerstream.com/SLA-fast-charge.htm

Which seems to contradict or discount the manufacturers specs due to modern chargers having safety circuits that constantly monitor the voltage to prevent damage, fears discounted I switched the new 12V battery to a 12A charge and ran it overnight to give the new Battery a full charge.

The following morning I tried again and still no joy, so at this point I can safely assume it is not a 12V service battery issue.

So I did much more searching on the Mia forums and found this

https://miahammia.wordpress.com/tag/obd

On diagnosing faults using CanBus and an Arduino, I have a spare Arduino Uno kicking around so I ordered the CanBus shield and waited some more, CanBus shield arrived and I immediately soldered all the pins on and loaded the sketch.

I am currently awaiting time to load the FTDI drivers on my netbook running Windows 7 Starter so it can recognize the Arduino Uno and I can test some CanBus reading software (eg. CanCool)

The Miahammia blog is fantastic and has a lot of information on different specific Mia related issues (ordered new daylight running led bulbs on the back of this blog post) https://miahammia.wordpress.com/2017/08/08/daylight-in-your-eyes

So after deciding that a ODBC CanBus reader is a must for the Mia I decided to do a little more generic searching on DIY ODBC Arduino based CanBus readers in the wider (non Mia Electric) community and found this.

https://medium.com/@alexandreblin/can-bus-reverse-engineering-with-arduino-and-ios-5627f2b1709a

OMG, this guy has skills! This blog is the nuts, this guy has managed to construct an Arduino CanBus reader with an integrated Bluetooth module and get it communicating with his IOS device and iPhone!

He has also published full details on his blog and all his source code for both the Arduino and the IOS device.

I am hopeful that these two blogs will enable me to build a very useful diagnostics kit for the Mia and possibly even have it feed to an Bluetooth enabled smartphone, Sweeeeeeeeeeeet!

Anyway whilst I have been fiddling around the Mia spontaneously came back to life (~3 days later) and so I ran every test I could think of to bring the fault back and discovered that it returns only after completing a full balanced charge (i.e. a charge to 100% not 99%)

So it appears to be some sort of BMS shutdown associated with a full 100% balanced charge.
Time to get busy with the CanBus reader, well I know what I will be doing this weekend :-)

I Love My Mia Electric

23/11/2017 Created new blog for Mia Electric, https://miaelectric.blogspot.co.uk to track Mia issues.
Had the Mia for a while now ~3 years, and she has been an absolute pleasure, however inevitably I would eventually end up experiencing technical issues and so I have created this new blog page to thrash out my current troubles.

The Mia has been good to me over the last few years, it passed its 1st MOT without incident other than the removal of a long since dead aftermarket reversing camera that the previous owner had fitted, I had to remove it as the number plate surround that came with the reversing camera obscured completely the Mia’s rear number plate illumination lights, therefore failing its MOT.

It was also noted that the rear tyres needed replacing (not done as yet) I am also aware that this Mia never had its first service and therefore still has it’s original gearbox oil, I also need this replaced soon as well.

But notwithstanding the general maintenance issues, I have noticed that the Mia does not like extreme cold, on frosty mornings she will often refuse to start, temp warning lights on the traction battery and drive motor, however once the sun has had time to warm the car it comes back to life and drives normally, my traction packs SOH is still at 96% after ~24000 miles.

Hot days can also be a problem if you have driven the car in hot weather and then try and charge immediately, occasionally it will refuse to charge until the car has cooled off a little, I have on occasion had to open all the doors to bring the temp down quicker so I can put the car on charge.

I have also has a number of small fuses blow to do with the head lights

Up till now all these problems have been overcome with simple usage adjustments and have not needed any major tinkering.