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Elgrand Android APP

Love the app so far. It recognised that the battery was flat *sigh*. The health section is excellent. I'll try to keep an eye on accuracy of measurements. Could the theme follow the phone's preference or could you provide a light/dark option.

Overall I think you have hit the right balance between nerdiness and utility. Nicely vibed 8) I would pay for this app.
 
Thanks. My brother is a software developer & son same. Both p'd off with my Claude coding 🤣.

I'll add the day night mode functionality next build.
 
I’d live to try this. I’m currently looking at using Real dash to create a digital dash to replace my flickering one. Takes a lot of time sniffing the CanBus to work out different functions. This looks great!
 
Thanks. My brother is a software developer & son same. Both p'd off with my Claude coding 🤣.

I'll add the day night mode functionality next build.
Great, you have your own QA team! What you bring is knowledge of the E51 and Claude gets you the rest of the way. We bought a Nvidia DGX Spark at work or as its formally known: "Jon's AI toy" 8)

Given the age of these beasts, a large proportion of your potential customers will have aging eyes and dark themes don't always work well for ... us. Having said that, one of my business partners (older than me) has always marched to a different drum and insists on dark everywhere. You mention day/night mode and that's a great idea, which could be triggered at dusk. You might be able to query Android for that or you'll need Location perms and a library that can calc dawn/dusk times given the very rough location.

That brings the general notion of accessibility into play. Get Claude to check your colour pallettes for suitability for people with various forms of colour and contrast perceptions. Consider text and widget sizes - again get Claude to do the grunt work here. I think it would be fair to assume "fit to drive" levels of capability, rather than trying to cover all possibilities.

I did find the initial config a little bit confusing. Bear in mind no one reads manuals (I've written many and beat my staff with them until the get the idea) so the first contact needs to be as simple as possible. I'll wipe my config and run through it again, taking notes.

I think you could monetise this app and I would definitely pay for it. You could do an ad supported "free" job with just the front screen in it and unlock all the other stuff for a fee. Bear in mind your market is aging and pretty small. On the other hand you might want to do it just for the love of it and go open source.

I'm a massive fan of open source but I suspect you will be mostly on your own on this one, so monetise the fuck out of it. I think I and other reasonably well off owners of a E51 would pay something like £3-5 per month without any complaints and probably rather more.

The Health monitors could save a very costly repair but all that stuff needs to be confirmed as diagnostic. Your app seems to be well directed so I suspect you know what you are on about. If it can give a reasonable warning of possible pending cat failure, which seems to get the locals here hyper-ventilating, then you will have a ready but quite small market.

The other things like reminders for MoT and so on is great. You might want to internationalise that and then you broaden your market. Claude will munch its way through that sort of thing. Read the country on first start from Android and offer it as a default and then set things like "safety inspection period", "safety inspection date", "tax period", "tax date". The world is a bit mad by default, so I suggest having a chat with your LLM firt about the tax and safety checks around the world, focussing around the UK, EU, Commonwealth countries and Japan.

I can't remember if I had to click through a stern warning about the efficacy of interpretation of the data gathered. If I didn't, you do need one.

Right, that's enough of that. I've got Glasto tickets to buy tomorrow am. We live 20 miles away from Pilton!
 
I’d live to try this. I’m currently looking at using Real dash to create a digital dash to replace my flickering one. Takes a lot of time sniffing the CanBus to work out different functions. This looks great!
If you want a test link drop me a DM with your google email. Thanks
 
Build 48 released on Play Store for testers to update

Thank you to everyone who sent logs. Most of these changes came from them.👍
  • Day, Night or Auto display
  • Screen stays on while connected
  • Quiet close at key-off
  • Logs record how a run ended
  • Reworked battery check
  • Warm idle needs three drives
  • Clearer messages on basic adapters
  • Fuel add-on setting and ABS fault codes
  • Start-up crash fixed on some phones
The full details are in the changelog in the NotebookLM. https://notebook.google.com/notebook/e4bc146a-fda4-4097-a8b6-2b42e8e5891f

Quick Start Guide: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ogLwzL7v0iUJ80vtgCiJ5XWVPUyBT71a/view?usp=share_link

If something's not right, go to Workshop > Report.
 
The app is asking me to enter the dash odo mileage (nice). However my E51 seems to have the speedo converted to mph but the odo still runs on km. Again this is an internationalisation thing.

Japan is just as weird as any other country and I have no idea what their standards for mensuration are and obviously, you know that we in the UK are probably not right in the head.

I suggest that you store and work with ISO standard units wherever possible and convert in and out as required. I base that advice on the fact that these beasties use km and s as base units. I think that three decimal places will be fine for all backend calcs and display mostly with zero or one DP.

I did manage to flatten the battery on mine (I'm a newbie) and your app noticed that. I jump started the beastie and ran it for a while (20km) and then eventually found my workshop charger and gave it a good old slow trickle charge for some hours. There is still a warning about the battery being flat on last start, which it wasn't. I also have a leisure battery fitted and need to work out how it is connected.

I suspect the main battery is a bit elderly and might need replacing, so I'm not going to diss your diags yet! I don't think your app asks for battery details - that would be nice to track too.

I recommend you seriously consider going to production with your latest release. It is rather more polished already than many "enterprise apps" I've had to deal with in the past. However, only do that if you have some boiler plate click thoughs in place and you are certain that the Health section is reasonably accurate.
 
My vLinker FD dongle has arrived - on testing it works 100% with all 19 live values and is slightly faster than its more expensive sister dongle the MC+. I bought this off eBay for about £25 new, this is the best dongle tested to date for the app.

IMG_20261003_164117.jpgElgrand_Tool_Dongle_Compatibility_20261005.jpg
 
My vLinker FD dongle
Would you mind linking to the seller?

A simple search on Ebay is breaking my braincell, those showing up at your sort of price have no front label IC & FCC ID info and then there's the V1.5 and V2.2 devices with a mix of BT3 and BT4 support.
 
My mistake. I bought off AliExpress for £23 not eBay... Took about a week to be delivered but it is spot on. I just got the FD one at £23.71


2026 New Vgate vLinker FD + BT4.0 V2.2 Car Diagnostic scanner ELM327 for Ford Forscan OBD2 Auto Scanner J2534 PK V1.5 ELM 327

There are some on eBay for £23 but if you're ok with AliExpress at least you'll know it's genuine.
 
My mistake. I bought off AliExpress for £23 not eBay... Took about a week to be delivered but it is spot on. I just got the FD one at £23.71


2026 New Vgate vLinker FD + BT4.0 V2.2 Car Diagnostic scanner ELM327 for Ford Forscan OBD2 Auto Scanner J2534 PK V1.5 ELM 327

There are some on eBay for £23 but if you're ok with AliExpress at least you'll know it's genuine.
It's ordered :grinning:
 
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