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It is coming along very nicely carry on!!

It's looking good.

The standard coolant mix is good to -34F Even if it is colder nothing will break. If you have Synthetic Oil The cold should not be a problem. With the electric cooling fan the engine will maintain temp. When it is very cold the real challenge is to warm up the rest of the drive train and suspension components after a long -40F night.

So last night a buddy and I did a little hardware hacking. Mrs. Chong informed me that at least one night last week, the overnight temperature in Regina Saskatchewan dipped down to -40C. For those that don't know, -40 is the convergence point (-40C = -40F). That level of cold is bad for things on many levels and is the reason that many cars sold in Canada ship with dealer installed block heaters stock. I'm going to be reaching out to my local Ford dealer to see if I can get a block heater installed in my van before we leave, but I'm also going to have a contingency, Fobuino... What you are looking at is the inside of a Ford dealer installed 1-Way Remote Start Transmitter wired to an Arduino UNO. My buddy has been telling me that this is something I should be doing for van road trips for awhile now. I kept pushing it back until I found out just how cold it gets up there. My buddy was in charge of hardware and I was in charge of the software. I do write all kinds of software everyday at work so this wasn't too challenging for me. The Arduino is a very easy platform to pick up and develop on. Pressing the button is simply closing a circuit. We used the Arduino complete the circuit and start the car. I wrote some very simple code to do this every hour. I configured the remote start settings in the cluster to run for the max time of 15 minutes and configured the heater settings to use the last settings from the climate control. Now all we have to do before shutting the engine off to climb into bed is crank the heat and the fans. Fobuino will handle the rest. I've made the code available under the MIT license. Version 1.0 seems to work pretty well. In the future, we plan to hook Fobuino into the OBD2 port to read the Engine Coolant Temp Sensor and use that to start the van rather than a simple timer. We didn't have all the hardware to do that last night, so the timer will work for now. Check it out on GitHub!