The KS16 Firmware Thread

[OliverH]

12 hours ago, DS said:

[..]

But I observed twice that when reaching max speed the wheel mismatched the messages and instead of "Decrease your speed" says "Hello Kingsong" followed by Bluetooth connection interruption which was the case with ver.1.15 too.

The new app is still very unstable, looks like got improve a bit, but this may not have in common with the new firmware.

Hopefully the Hello Kingsong is no sign of a reboot. Does the KS16 struggles in this moment?

Anyway the firmware looks even after pull back not tested well enough that I install it on our KS16.

1 hour ago, Frankman said:

The app for iOS that I installed on my iPAD seems to work better than the Android version.

It's not easy to deal with this diversification in the Android market.

[DS]

1 hour ago, OliverH said:

Hopefully the Hello Kingsong is no sign of a reboot. Does the KS16 struggles in this moment?

Yeah, hopefully. Kind of worrisome. The Bluetooth restarts and creates a mess...the music switches to play on the phone speaker and not always turns back when the BT reconnects.

No sign of struggles. I would not dare to reach 30 km/h on a slope, so the energy consumption on a flat even path is quite in norms and the wheel has additional power reserve up to 45 km/h.

Edited June 5, 2016 by DS

[OliverH]

34 minutes ago, DS said:

Yeah, hopefully. Kind of worrisome. The Bluetooth restarts and creates a mess...the music switches to play on the phone speaker and not always turns back when the BT reconnects.

No sign of struggles. I would not dare to reach 30 km/h on a slope, so the energy consumption on a flat even path is quite in norms and the wheel has additional power reserve up to 45 km/h.

Would be nice to see the load of the MCU/CPU with all this gadget stuff (Audio, BT App connect) running.

[DS]

2 hours ago, OliverH said:

Would be nice to see the load of the MCU/CPU with all this gadget stuff (Audio, BT App connect) running.

In some future KS could implement the equivalent of Task Manager/Performance/CPU Usage (History) in their app.

[esaj]

4 hours ago, OliverH said:

Would be nice to see the load of the MCU/CPU with all this gadget stuff (Audio, BT App connect) running.

 

2 hours ago, DS said:

In some future KS could implement the equivalent of Task Manager/Performance/CPU Usage (History) in their app.

You're mixing an MCU / software running straight on "bare metal" (directly on hardware) with real-time operating systems. There's no threading/scheduling, different "programs"/tasks, it's all (probably) based on just constantly running code & interrupts. Unless there are some "sleeps"/waiting for something to happen somewhere, it's basically running at 100% utilization at all times (ie. as fast as possible).

[OliverH]

1 hour ago, esaj said:

 

You're mixing an MCU / software running straight on "bare metal" (directly on hardware) with real-time operating systems. There's no threading/scheduling, different "programs"/tasks, it's all (probably) based on just constantly running code & interrupts. Unless there are some "sleeps"/waiting for something to happen somewhere, it's basically running at 100% utilization at all times (ie. as fast as possible).

But we had the reports from 9b1 riders with "high loads"/ balancing problems (?) with BT switched on. Not sure if the code is implemented as it should be. Or if he design are not working smooth with software like tooth in a gearbox.

Edited June 5, 2016 by OliverH

[esaj]

6 minutes ago, OliverH said:

BIT wie Hand the reports from 9b1 riders with "high loads"/ balancing problems (?) with BT switched on. Not sure if the code is implemented as it should be. Or if he design are not working smooth with software like tooth in a gearbox.

It's possible that the software cannot "react" fast enough with lots of interrupts occurring at the same time. But still, this works differently than on a RT-OS with scheduling. For example, it's possible to see load averages "above 100%" on a linux-box (ie. load-value exceeds the number of cores on the system), but that's just the scheduler showing that there are more processes on the run-queue with "ready to run"-state than the system can handle. With an MCU, there's no internal scheduling or such "built-in", although there are several RT-OSs done on top of MCUs, but then the firmware needs to be built against that OS, not directly on hardware (so it actually uses the scheduling). Code running straight on hardware won't have such scheduling or direct way to measure "load"; it would need to know the ratio between how long the system "sleeps" and how long it's running some code to incur some sort of "load percentage". That's what a process/thread scheduler will do.

The scheduling/threading will cause some extra overhead (although probably not much if done well, like NPTL for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_POSIX_Thread_Library , at work, my server-systems run thousands if not tens of thousands of threads per 24-core system without much overhead from sleeping threads). 

If the "slowdown" is really caused by the BT-stack, the Ninebot-development team should debug it with timing code injected into different parts of the system to see how long each part takes to execute, and then determine whether they can optimize the code or need to use a faster MCU.

[kmoon]

 

On 6/3/2016 at 11:55 AM, ThomasK said:

same with me except that I updated from 1.13 to 1.20

Judging from the initial firmware version, you must have one of the early batches, right?

What is the name of your unit? 
Mine is KS-097 and I am a bit reluctant to update, since the indication so far is, that the early batches may not be compatible.

[HEC]

On ‎04‎/‎06‎/‎2016 at 11:20 PM, DS said:

Just in case, before that, I removed the SIM card - did not want eventual phone call interruption.

It's actually easier (and most of all safer) to put the phone in the airplane mode and then switch on the BT and WiFi only as with removed SIM phone still connects to Cellular network (so you can make an emergency call).

[DS]

3 hours ago, HEC said:

It's actually easier (and most of all safer) to put the phone in the airplane mode

I was thinking about this option but decided that all the connections would be gone.

Nice to know that

[edwin_rm]

On 6/5/2016 at 6:59 AM, DS said:

Yeah, hopefully. Kind of worrisome. The Bluetooth restarts and creates a mess...the music switches to play on the phone speaker and not always turns back when the BT reconnects.

No sign of struggles. I would not dare to reach 30 km/h on a slope, so the energy consumption on a flat even path is quite in norms and the wheel has additional power reserve up to 45 km/h.

Your problem is that you have the King Song voice activated. Disable it with the app. If you leave the voice warnings enabled + play music, then when you reach max speed and KS says "please decelerate" multiple times in a row, it will kill your bluetooth connection. In other words, the machine cannot do both things at the same time: play music + talk.

But to solve this, all you have to do is disable the KS voice alarms. Easy peasy. You don't need them. That's what the beeps are for. The beeps won't interfere with the music.

[ThomasK]

15 hours ago, kmoon said:

 

Judging from the initial firmware version, you must have one of the early batches, right?

What is the name of your unit? 
Mine is KS-097 and I am a bit reluctant to update, since the indication so far is, that the early batches may not be compatible.

The name of my wheel shown within Bluetooth is KS-16-183. Within the app it is identified as KS16D1W0160325063 - may be it is produced March 25th??? I got it in April so this might be possible...

And your device is running on which version, kmoon?

 

[ThomasK]

Distance travelled not correct?

I updated the firmware from 1.13 to 1.20 without any difficulties. The odometer seems to be fixed and is not losing it's total mileage any longer, at least not until now . But it looks like the distance travelled (and therefore the total mileage may be affected as well) is not correct. Riding a short route of 2.1 km which is confirmed by car, gps, google maps and bike computer - the KS states the distance as 2.6 km. Did this short ride now several times with the same result.

Has someone made the same obervation?

Edited June 7, 2016 by ThomasK

[Henrik Olsen]

Upgraded successfully from 1.18 to 1.20 yesterday on iOS....  Odometer state lost, otherwise all seems fine...

[DS]

9 hours ago, edwin_rm said:

Your problem is that you have the King Song voice activated. Disable it with the app. If you leave the voice warnings enabled + play music, then when you reach max speed and KS says "please decelerate" multiple times in a row, it will kill your bluetooth connection. In other words, the machine cannot do both things at the same time: play music + talk.

Good point. I will disable the voice and then test it.

Unfortunately, today when I started (normal start, no over lean) I heard again the message "Caution, overpowered". The wheel was actually stable but I hoped this problem has been solved with the new firmware. For now, it is only the message, the wheel has not thrown me off on start like before with 1.15 ver.

Let's see...

7 hours ago, ThomasK said:

Has someone made the same obervation?

Same here, the odometer is not correct and the new (beta) android app is not stable (shuts off), so I do not rely on it to measure distance.

Edited June 7, 2016 by DS

[OliverH]

24 minutes ago, DS said:

Good point. I will disable the voice and then test it.

Unfortunately, today when I started (normal start, no over lean) I heard again the message "Caution, overpowered". The wheel was actually stable but I hoped this problem has been solved with the new firmware. For now, it is only the message, the wheel has not thrown me off on start like before with 1.15 ver.

Let's see...

Same here, the odometer is not correct and the new (beta) android app is not stable (shuts off), so I do not rely on it to measure distance.

We still have 1.15 on the KS16. No problem to be thrown off at the start. But I heard that story before from a user.

[DS]

1 hour ago, OliverH said:

But I heard that story before from a user.

Most probably from me. I cried it around 

I haven't heard a similar report from another user.

Edited June 7, 2016 by DS

[Toma]

Do kingsong ship with the most resent software or is it up to the buyer to sort this. i should be getting mine soon and just a bit nervous to update especially as i have an android phone and what ive read with issues regarding the firmware.

 

Edited June 7, 2016 by Toma

[DS]

2 hours ago, Toma said:

Do kingsong ship with the most resent software or is it up to the buyer to sort this.

What is observed is that KS regularly update the firmware before dispatching their units. I do not think the client has the option to choose a version, you may ask your distributor for this.

Edited June 7, 2016 by DS

[dside]

Just a little heads up regarding the beta-app itself;

I couldn't get the KSV3.apk to work on my Android 6 because it didn't ask the permission to use the location and I couldn't give it to it. Now I just tried to download the app again from kingsong's page http://www.kingsong.com/Service.html and Lo and behold! It has been updated and now it indeed asks for location permissions! I can happily say that it now works fine for Android 6 (& Honor 6).

edit: works, but it's still buggy - disconnects all the time etc.

Edited June 8, 2016 by dside

[JumpMaster]

@dside

I've downloaded the app from kingsong too but do not get a permission popup.

 

The download link is for version 1.2
http://www.kingsong.com/Uploads/files/20160422/KingSong Android APP.apk

 

What version do you have?

[dside]

2 hours ago, JumpMaster said:

@dside

I've downloaded the app from kingsong too but do not get a permission popup.

 

The download link is for version 1.2
http://www.kingsong.com/Uploads/files/20160422/KingSong Android APP.apk

 

What version do you have?

There is no popup, you have to give the permission from app setup. 

I have V1.2 but I thought the beta app works with all the versions.

[JumpMaster]

I forgot permissions could be turned on/off from the settings menu. That's fixed the issue! Thanks.

[DS]

Some v.1.20 observations so far:

1. The played music from BT connection interrupts when the wheel shakes from passing bumps/potholes

2. Twice I had a momentarily power loss (not enough to throw me off) accompanied with voice "Caution, overpowered" when I start normally to ride. This issue was much worse with v.1.15.

Edited June 19, 2016 by DS

[LGJ]

Anyone able to help

I was upgrading from 1.13 to 1.20 it took ages lost connection and I cannot turn the wheel off

the android phone cannot even see the wheel anymore,   I eventually got the wheel to update again and it shows that it has 1.20 but it just spins out of control and has no forward or back balance. Kingsong France has been most helpful but unfortunately I had to send it back for sorting out. Hope no one else has that bad luck.

More info, it seems that when the firmware upgrade went wrong the next choice was to load new firmware but it asked the model number, I said 16A because that is what I was so sure I had but I have the 16B, I am told 16A have a battery check on top and a chiny handle.

At the moment if you use the 16A firmware on a 16B you are screwed but Kingsong have not actually warned anyone. So Please don't make the same mistake as me. Happy wheeling if you have one.

Edited June 29, 2016 by LGJ
more info