Traveling the OReGO Trail - Dead Battery & Phantom Trips (Pt2)

As reported earlier, the OReGO program is reporting that my battery Voltage is low. It was low, but I installed a new battery (and terminal connectors) and topped the Voltage off with a smart charger. Despite this, it still reports as low on the OReGO dashboard.

You can see in the two images below, that the Voltage is normal.

Battery Voltage Level w/ vehicle off

Battery Voltage Level w/ vehicle running

So above, you can see that the Voltage is normal. Here is what OReGO shows:

OReGO Dashboard Reports
The Battery Voltage As 10.49V

Today, the Azuga program manager for OReGO called me and explained that they found the bug that is causing this problem. In short, the bug is that the device sends a message when the Voltage is back above 10.5V. If the vehicle is garaged or in an area with poor cellular reception, this message could be lost. If this message is lost, then the Voltage level is not sampled again.

They have two fixes for this. First, the short term fix (coming soon). It will work this way: Every time the vehicle is started, any low Voltage state flags will be cleared and the system will return to normal Voltage reporting. Second, the long term fix (requires more code changes) works this way: battery Voltage levels will be reported along with other telemetry data. These messages require acknowledgement from the receiver or else they are retransmitted (like TCP traffic on the Internet).

So there you have it, the mystery of the low battery Voltage is solved (and will soon be fixed).

Now all that is left to figure out is the cause of the phantom trips. The Azuga program manager also mentioned that another vehicle in the program was experiencing this issue too. Ironically, the other vehicle is a Nissan LEAF (my daily driver).