Cathy, my wife, organized a build party for GaryGid's SOC-Meter kit for Seattle-area Leaf owners. We got enough interest to order 10 kits. The kits arrived in time for Cathy to build our meter in advance. Along the way, she made some tweaks and added photos to Gary's assembly manual.
We arranged to meet at a local Maker space, StudentRND (
http://studentrnd.org/), in Bellevue. It's a great shop, with lots of room to work and cool tools like a laser cutter. If you're in the area, we recommend checking them out.
Despite the inclement weather (we had to shovel two inches of mostly ice from our steep 500-foot drive to get our Leaf on the road), we had a good turnout. Here's a photo Cathy took early in the process:
A little later, there was more going on as people made progress on their kits. I'm in the back of the photo, working on my iPhone program for logging EV data.
The only barrier to getting the assembly done in a couple of hours is letting the silicone adhesive cure for an hour in the middle of the process. Still, we had a couple of folks finish and test their meters during the meeting. We also learned that if you have multiple people sharing the work to assemble a kit, each should have a copy of the instructions.
Cathy is putting the finishing touches on an update to the assembly manual with some insights she learned from the party.
We now have our meter fully installed in the car. It's awesome. We have two other EVs that have SOC meters, which we really missed in the Leaf. Thanks to Gary for creating the kit and to everyone in the community who contributed to decoding the CAN messages and making the whole thing possible.