Nice video indeed and a good video angle aswell, will test that 
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Pretty solid email update from Jan. Doesn’t seem like that’s the norm in this hobby. Best of luck with the transition to full time. Looking forward to my order after the EU gets squared away.
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Thanks. 
Just for the context, here’s what I just sent out to everyone on the waiting list by email. There’s some info that may be relevant for other folks here as well.
Dear fellow riders,
This is to inform you about the current state of the DAVEGA X lead time and to set realistic expectations about when you might receive the unit(s) you have ordered.
During the last couple of months, I haven’t been able to keep up with the pace of the incoming orders. This is for various reasons. Most importantly, there has been and still is a lot of problems with the supply chain due to the covid-19. I also haven’t been able to allocate enough time to the project because of other responsibilities including a daily job and a family with two kids.
I’m now in the process of transforming the DAVEGA from a hobby to a small business and starting from July, I’ll be working on DAVEGA full time. I have a long list of exciting new features that I’ll finally be able to bring to life. More importantly though, it should allow me to catch up with the orders. It will still take some time to work through the waiting list that has already grown quite a bit so please bear with me.
Some of you have been waiting since February, which is unfortunate and I apologize for that. I’m currently missing a few critical parts and I assume it won’t be until mid June until I can start shipping DAVEGAs again. Then I think I should be able to dispatch around 10 units per week and starting from July, I can hopefully at least double that. Below you’ll find the current waiting list and see how many orders are ahead of you. This should give you some idea about how much longer you’ll need to wait.
I want to inform you that I’ll soon be getting a VAT registration , which is bad news for EU customers since I’ll then need to start charging VAT 21%. This will probably come into effect in July. Because of that, I’ll be prioritizing EU orders in June so that EU customers can benefit from the VAT-free prices as much as possible. Ideally, I’d like to handle all existing EU orders until the end of June. The customers outside of EU won’t be affected by the VAT registration in any way but will unfortunately be put through even more waiting, which I’m very sorry about. I hope this is understandable.
I’d like to ask you to kindly refrain from responding to this email since I won’t have the capacity to answer to everyone individually. If you have any general questions about DAVEGA, please check the https://davega.eu/ website first, including the FAQ and the User Guide. Also the following thread at esk8.news contains a lot of information and is a great place for asking your questions publicly: DAVEGA X: Gauging interest.
If you’d like to make any changes to your order, you’ll definitely have the opportunity before I send you the invoice. Please wait until I get back to you and we’ll discuss all the details then. Please be patient. It may take a while but nobody will be left out or forgotten. I promise.
Thank you if you have managed to read until this point. I hope for your understanding. I’ll do my best for the long waiting to be worth it.
All the best,
Jan
(a long list of about 50 poor peeps on the waiting list follows)
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When you say you’ll be working on Davega full time, does that mean ironing the kinks for davega X hardware, or working on the next davega hardware version?
I don’t have any issues with my unit, but I see the occasional corruption resulting in lost data, or the random screen flickers that people get… Etc.
Looking forward to what you work on next
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My unit is also fine.
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Yes, there are already developments on the hardware. There’s DAVEGA X v1.1 that is just a minor refinement of the current v1.0. It switches from 5V input to 3.3V and bypasses the voltage regulator on the ESP32 development board used by the current design. That regulator is definitely the root cause of the WiFi flakiness on some units. It may be the root cause of some of the other problems as well though I haven’t yet been able to verify that (mainly because my EVO burned down on the second day of testing 
). I already sent out test units to people and I’ll be switching to that design if all looks good.
In parallel with that, the next generation DAVEGA (codename DAVEGA X2; may still change) is being developed, which will be done in a more professional way. It no longer relies on a development board. There will be a lot more RAM and CAN bus. Prototypes should arrive in about 2 weeks. @linsus and @Pimousse have been a great help in this and I want to publicly thank them both.
Once I have more time (probably not before July), I also want to start putting a lot more effort in the software development. The flash corruption that you mentioned is very likely a software problem that has to be addressed. People occasionally get memory errors, which is no good. Davega tool needs improving – the export/import flakiness on Windows. Something has to be done about the “bad things happened and now I don’t know my device ID”. Screen redrawing could be faster. All of this has to be addressed.
I’d like to add a few small features to the current DAVEGA as well. However, I’m already reaching its memory limits with the micropython platform and there’s no room for a lot of extras. More serious new features will unfortunately have to be limited to the next generation DAVEGA only. The plan is to be easy for people to upgrade to the “X2” if they decide to. It will be a matter of replacing the electronics in the housing and I hope to be able to offer the upgrades at prices that won’t break the bank.
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Awesome to keep everyone up to date on the progress.
Its probably way too early to ask for feature requests, but…
- It would be cool if there was an additional “ridding screen main” for temperatures. The largest number could be vesc temp as everyone has that sensor, motor temp, and battery temp for future functionality.
- It’s a small detail, but I am kinda disappointed that range does not go negative, it only stops at zero.
- Automated backups of user data, preferably online. I think this is kinda necessary. It does not have to be super often, once every 5 rides would be plenty enough for me. But far as I understand this backup feature would not be possible on current hardware?
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Interesting idea. The direction I’d like to go is rather than adding zillions of screens that will fit everyone needs, make the screens customizable.
The range is how much distance you can still cover with whatever energy you have left in your battery. It could only be negative if the amount of energy was negative. How could that ever be negative?
Absolutely. This is high on my TODO list. It’s unfortunately not straightforward since trying to upload data over WiFi currently often leads to memory error and a restart (after which it almost always succeeds). Ideally the backups would happen in the background, maybe while charging, but should it cause restarts, that would be a really bad user experience. This will require some more memory usage optimizations.
Because I have the davega setup to 90% capacity of the battery. Which I like it keeps me from over discharging. But occasionally I get in a situation where I have to use more than 90%, in which case the range on davega goes to zero but the board still keeps going for a while. I’d just like to know how far past zero I have gone in that situation.
It’s not really a hard number as wh/km can be vastly different sometimes. Like it you have to face. A strong head wind on the way back. And I like davga setup to a more average ride scenario.
As soon as the X2 are available for testing @janpom , I would love to put one on the Madness build 
it’s ready and waiting to just plug in and go.
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I see. That actually makes sense. You are getting past what you think of as “available battery capacity” in that scenario. In a way your current capacity would be below 0% then, thus negative, which would imply negative range. I’ll have to think about this some more though. Sounds like a potentially very confusing concept.
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Well the frase negative range makes no sense. But mathimatically it makes sense with how the hardware / software functions.
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Would it be possible for DAVEGA not to record some stats like top speed, say under a certain current? So that when I bench test or wheel spin it doesn’t throw my figures out?
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That would be nice. Probably can’t be based on current though. You could achieve the top speed while going downhill with zero current.
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Maybe a manual no record option then in the menu as an easy solution then if the math sucks.
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You’ll probably forget to enable it anyway. Maybe a menu item for setting the lifetime max speed value such that you can set it back in case a bench test overwrites it.
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This is true, I probably would. The only problem with setting the max speed manually is it feels like cheating.
Could just be a simple reset for the lifetime max speed. Then all you have to do is hit that speed again 
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I think I managed to fix the export/import flakiness in the Windows version of the DAVEGA Tool. I can no longer reproduce the failure in VirtualBox. Could anyone with a standard Windows installation test this for me, please?
Here’s the updated DAVEGA Tool:
https://davega.eu/downloads/davegax-tool/davegax-tool-v1.3rc-win32.zip
To test:
- download and unzip
- connect DAVEGA to USB port
- run davega-tool.exe and [1] Auto-detect port
- run davega-tool.exe and [5] Export filesystem
This should successfully create a non-empty .dfs file.
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What about just a bench test ‘mode’ where nothing is recorded
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