Dr. Prius on my Gen 3 Prius

Just got my OBDII Bluetooth device (I went with Panlong mini) and started using it. It seems it connects to the app (I only have the free version so far) and battery monitor is working. A lot of good parameters being displayed. This app will be very useful down the road.

I have one issue that I couldn't figure out though: Why do the battery bars move up and down so much???
I understand that the batteries are constantly being charged and discharged but bars are moving up and down as if I am looking at a stereo equalizer app not a Dr. Prius app.

Any input?

 

Thanks Grit for the response. Absolutely visual inspection of bars is much better than checking bunch of numbers. The bars though move up/down so much that it is almost impossible to tell which ones really low. I tried to find a video of it to compare but all videos are about hybrid battery test (which I currently don't have).

I will play with the app more to see if I can get an idea of which pair is lower than the others but I doubt I will be able to succeed. I will try to get a short video clip and post it here later on.

P.S My Stereo Equalizer example was just a funny analogy. Perhaps yours is a better one...

 

Well, I am not getting much answer to this. Seems this is pretty much the behavior for everyone.

I used the app again this morning. I realized one thing which improved the issue. I rotated the phone to landscape orientation which made the screen wider and thus battery voltage bars got shorter. This reduced the speed of the bars since they do not travel up/down as much anymore. But they still move lot more than I would think they should. Let me put it this way, I cannot read any voltage of any block because they none stay at the same height for more than a second.

May I ask something else? What is the yellow battery bar mean?
I first thought they turn yellow when they get discharged but it is not it.

 

Thanks for this tip. I will try that. I knew about this mode but didn't think about it.
Do you have any idea of the yellow battery bars? They turn from green to yellow time to time. I have seen this during a discharge most of the time but I cannot say for sure because it doesn't happen all the time.

 

Hi Mendel,

The free version of the app provides real-time battery monitoring. You get the voltages of the 14 pairs (each consists of 2x 6-cell NiMH packs connected in series) and some other important parameters like charge/discharge rate, pack temperature, etc.
It doesn't do ant of the battery tests.

When you were using yours, did you realize the bars moving up/down really fast and especially did you realize the green battery bars were changing to yellow color time to time?

I will buy this app eventually, I just wanted to make sure the OBDII device I bought is working properly first. The voltage values changing at this rate does absolutely not look normal to me.
If I can figure out how to do a screen recording on my device, I will post a quick video here.

 

Thanks for the replies.

Dr. Prius website really doesn't contain much information (unless I am looking at the wrong website) other than a few posted videos and most of those about battery test. None is about the real time voltage monitoring. I checked the FAQ section and found one question that is referring to voltage bar colors. It was only talking about the Orange and Red though, no mention of the yellow color. I will do more research on this.

After thinking about the fast voltage bar movement, I have come up with only one possible scenario: The bars must indicate the tenth or possibly the hundredth digit of the voltage of each pair of modules (what they call block). Only then I can understand the fast movement.

I will try wat PriusV17 suggested above to see if I can get a more steady bar graph.