EV Benefit

And here I thought I was so clever for accidentally discovering "feathering." So, is EV a way to force the car to run off of battery alone? I've been thinking there ought to be a switch for that? Where is it though? Or is it software? If it is software, will it void the warranty since the whole car is so computer based?

 

Very interesting!!! When I drove my car home from Helena I expected to see a full battery. Those of you that have not been over western passes may not get this. These were the dreadful mountains that Louis and Clark wrote of. On a fairly good down hill with some runaway truck pull outs for truckers who have lost their brakes I could not get above 7 bars. I think this brings me to a closer understanding of the energy management. One wonders if anyone has "hacked" ( in the good sense of the word) the software of the Prius to determine how it does it's job. I wonder what language it was written in. Did they "do" their own OS or "borrow" one. I would love to look at the code. Maybe it is written is assembler. Does any one know what the CPU is? I am sorry I get wound up trying to understand how things work.

 

Geez Henry, you must be as old or older than I am! Frankly, I doubt it written in assembler. memory and CPUs are plenty cheap enough to allow a little compiled code inefficiency to gain easy of coding and maintenance of the code. I think they should give us the specs so we can create our own touch screen applications. Make it useful for things like turning off the reverse beeper and how the doors unlock!

I think Daniel is right. If used in specifically strategic ways, EV should be able to save a little bit of gas. As others have said before, the car doesn't know how long your trip will be or the terrain you will cover. For most people, the little bit of improvement wouldn't be worth the effort to figure out when they could use EV to advantage. But to others, it is FUN! (where is the geek emoticon?)

For FrogDancer, read through the site ( OK it will take WEEKS! ) That should take care of the dampness behind your ears I learned and continue to learn an immense amount of useful information from PriusChat.

 

hdrygas,
Don't know who's OS it is or the chipset but a majority of vehicle computer in the US have previously run an OS designed by Wind River Systems (trades on NASDAQ under WIND) It is a small and very stable OS. As far as languages go, it seems to me that everything today is written in C. All of this is of course uninformed speculation.

 

If I had a bet (and it would be a bet), I'd agree with jchu and say the firmware in the Prii was written in C. (With perhaps a caveat about the Prii display screen and its control being something else).

The company I work for writes embedded code for very, very small components -- very little RAM available. However, assembly is rarely, if ever, used; C is small enough (or in-line assembly code can be added in cases where you must shrink it down by a few 100 bytes.)

We've used C++ in some cases, but it's usually on instruments that we intend to be extensible, with software/features added to the instrument over time. (I.e., adding "software components" is conceptually easier with a OO language (and good design up-front)).

 

Lets see. My first language was Dartmouth Basic. Followed by Fortran. Then machine language and assembler for the Apple ][. Followed by Pascal. I had a Apple ][ with a language card 64k. Incredible. Remember loading programs with a cassette recorder in Apple Basic. Oh I learned that but not a great stretch for me. It all started because our college got a modem hook up to Dartmouth and only "Math majors" could handle it. They might consider applications by Physics majors. I was a poor dumb chem/bio major who was told I could not measure up. Four weeks later I was selling programs to do physics lab experiments. Never tell a dyslexic that they can't do something!