EVSE – V2G EVSE Limited

Standards Based V2x Charging Station Technology

We have been asked to elucidate on the nature of the work we will undertake following our successful bid for Department for Transport funding. Whilst we await ministerial sign off on the associated press release please note the following items of information. The title of the project is:

Vehicle to Grid Controller with Modular Communications

Our tagline above mentions:

Standards based V2x charging station technology

Here is an infographic based on a slide from the “International V2G Standards” presentation I gave at the International Energy Agency’s (IEA for short) Hybrid and Electric Vehicles (HEV for short) Technology Collaboration Programme (TCP for short) Wireless Charging and V2X Experts’ Workshop held at the Newcastle University Business School on March 20th 2018:

Our current funding does not cover the development of any power electronics.

Hopefully that is of some help?

EV Charging Station Administration using OCPP 1.6 with SteVe

As part of our mission to experiment with “alternative” electric vehicle charging station communications technologies we’ve been searching for open source software for the “server” end of things that supports OCPP 1.6. We’d been looking at the ChargeTime Java server from Thomas Volden when news reached us that the SteVe project from the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen had just been updated to (mostly) support OCPP 1.6. As the ReadMe puts it:

SteVe was developed at the RWTH Aachen University and means Steckdosenverwaltung, namely socket administration in German. The aim of SteVe is to support the deployment and popularity of electric mobility, so it is easy to install and to use. SteVe provides basic functions for the administration of charge points, user data, and RFID cards for user authentication and was tested successfully in operation.

SteVe is considered as an open platform to implement, test and evaluate novel ideas for electric mobility, like authentication protocols, reservation mechanisms for charge points, and business models for electric mobility. SteVe is distributed under GPL and is free to use. If you are going to deploy SteVe we are happy to see the logo on a charge point.

We eagerly cloned SteVe from GitHub and carefully followed the instructions. Working from the Scientific Linux command line it took a while for Maven to do its thing and then SteVe burst into life at the very first time of asking!

SteVeStartup

Next we tried SteVe on our trusty Raspberry Pi 3B. Whilst we have previously successfully used MySQL on a RasPi on this occasion it seemed prudent to configure SteVe to use the existing database on our Linux server. Having allowed him through our firewall once again SteVe immediately burst into life without further ado.

It took slightly more work to get him working inside Eclipse. We had to set up a suitable “Maven Build” configuration:

SteVeMaven

which produced this by way of console output:

SteVeConsole

The only slight fly in the ointment at the moment is that SteVe doesn’t yet support OCPP 1.6 charging profiles:

SteVeProfile

However we confidently anticipate that issue being solved in the not too distant future! As a side effect of this exercise we have also produced a forked version of the ChargeTime OCPP client, together with a modest demonstration “charging station”. Please feel free to check them out at:

https://github.com/V2G-Ltd/Java-OCA-OCPP

and

https://github.com/V2G-Ltd/OCPP-1.6-EVSE-Demo

That all works fine for us on our Azul Zulu equipped Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3.

V2G EVSE OCPP 1.6 on a Raspberry Pi Compute Module

Regular readers of the blog of our parent company will be aware that we’ve been experimenting with the assorted generations of the Raspberry Pi single board computer since it was first launched here in the United Kingdom. Now we’re going into the hardware business it seemed like the perfect time to try out the “industrial version” of the venerable Pi. Here’s how our Compute Module 3 setup looks on the test bench:

Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 on the V2G EVSE test bench

We had a few problems getting everything up and running in the first place. That explains the serial console cable you can see at the top. More on all that in due course, but first of all please take a look at what that console is displaying:

2018-03-30_2000-RasPiCM3-OCPP_1_6

A working copy of version 0.1 of the V2G EVSE OCPP 1.6 alpha firmware! As a close inspection of the output reveals, there’s a few bugs still to be ironed out, and a lot more intelligence to be baked into the CM3’s electronic brain.

However our first technical milestone has now been passed successfully, so now you may wish to head on over to the V2G EVSE CM3 project page to discover more about the niggling little problems we encountered persuading the CM3 to run Java, and how we got around them…..