Hello everyone,
I was wondering if there’s a EV Charging Station/wallbox that is compatible with openhab aside Tesla? I tried to find it but I couldn’t really find it. My goal is to be able to get status of the car battery charge while its connected an enable/disable the charging during power event.
THank you
What make of car do you have?
You may achieve the same through your car’s API.
I don’t want it car dependant. Right now I have a bolt EV and OnStar is the worst thing ever to exist. But I cannot control anything related to charging from OnStar anyway.
I want to control the charging station so I don’t have to rely on internet connection to my car (and implementing different bindings for different brand).
I know of openevse but it cannot be exported to Canada.
I don’t know for charging in Canada, but here in Germ
Germany AC charing is too dumb - the wallbox only tells the on board charger what current to consume. That’s type 2 charging - maybe the same goes for your setup.
Chademo or CSS are more communicative so the charging station knows what’s the status of the battery.
I checked out openevse - from what I saw they don’t claim to know the SOC.
Best,
Sascha
I live in Germany and can fully control my openWB from inside openHAB. Don’t know their export policy. You need to find a wallbox which supports Modbus Tcp, then openHAB should be able to control it. Information about state of battery charge typically requires data supplied by the car, either via ISO 15118 through the charging cable or via car’s API. Most EV do not support 15118 so you usually are stuck to car’s API.
AC Loading currently lacks protocols to exchange data, there’s practically no way to retrieve EV SoC from the car via the wallbox.
To overcome this restriction you’ll have to use the API of the EV to poll that information. on the other hand, if you have an open API Wallbox, you can tell the Wallbox to load (mostly in Milliampere steps), so you can use PV excess charging or “fast” charging, if for e.g. your dynamic energy price is low.
You could use a Bluetooth/WiFi based solution, which connects to the OBD-II (something like https://evnotify.de/, http://api.openvehicles.com/, …), then you are independent on your EV API, but I think you’ll have to find a solution to integrate this in you LAN, if you don’t want to use cloud at all.
There’s a neat application for that:
(sorry, mostly german discussions, but english interface and documentation available).
And there’s also a binding in openHAB for that you can use - but evcc also has a REST API available.
I use the Go E charger and binding and it works great (with Zoe and MG5)
You need to program the rules to set the charging current.
That’s something, evcc can do for you. Pretty good configuration settings.
I tell evcc via its REST API what mode to use and some target SoC commands (if you have dynamic energ tariffs like tibber/Awattar evcc will start charging if prices are low)
I started reading EVCC and I was lost. I’m unsure what it is in the end? I don’t have any solar power. I already have all the intelligence in openhab with nodered for the dynamic energ tarrif.
I wonder, how does Flo, Charging point and other level 2 charging station that I can drive to (not talking about DC Fast Charging) does report my battery level in their own app? Like I open Flo apps and I see my car is charging at station x, it cost me x so far, I used x energy and my batterie is at x. How can this not done with home one?
Zoe and MG5, is that the name of some go e charger? Currently on the website, I see Gemini, Gemini Flex and home+
first off: The public charging stations can read the SoC of your EV’s battery, because DC charging uses different protocols than AC charging. I bet, you use (slow?) DC charging and therefore the SoC is shown.
second: all the other data can be collected via AC charging (either the public charging station or your wallbox, which you can access) information (current power, used energy, energy costs if tariff is available, …).
If you charge via AC (regardless via public statoin or your wallbox), in order to get the EV’s SoC, you have to use other sources than the AC-cable, because there simply is no protocol in place for that.
coming back to evcc and/or openHAB. If you don’t have PV and therefore no PV excess calculations, the advantage of evcc is a bit smaller, of course. evcc can work without PV and has access to at least tibber and awatter for dynamic tariffs. But: if you have everything in place, you “only” need to access your cars API (or some of the ODB-II based solutions). For an integration of these into openHAB you have to look for a binding and/or do the heavy lifting via API/MQTT yourself.
that could be a plus for evcc, because there’s already working integrations with EVNotify or openVehicles).
When I talk about public charging station, it is not slow DC I’m talking about. It’s level 2 7kw/h charging station that use the same connector as my portable charger. Charge point, flo, many station like that exist. I’m not talking about the other that use the extra 2 connection on the bottom for DC charging and cost way more. It is station that take about 8 hours to charge like at home. I pay like 1$/hour on these. And they still show my battery level on the app. Don’t ask me how they do it, I really don’t know 
So what is EVCC? From my understanding it’s something to manage charging with solar charging?
I also found some charging station that say they work with OCPP and I saw a binding for these. Unsure how there work though.
Is there a wifi ODB2 that I could install (and forget) in my bold that I can configure to connect to my home wifi and then get all these information?
You should have typed in credentials for your EV then and the station will then poll the API from your car.
evcc was built around PV excess charging, yes. but in the meantime it added some more functionality to it (dynamic tariffs, OCPP, …).
But be aware, OCPP is available in different version. The EVs and the chargers (wallbox, public chargers, …) must provide hardware bound to versions for this. It’s a very “new” and not nearly as broad protocol standard, AFAIK there’s not nearly enough support for it across the board, only few chargers/wallboxes and EVs do support it, though.
What it is:
plug and forget would be some of these - but they’re a bit more expensive:
nope no credential. Only credential is for the app itself (which is not required cause I have a touch card). He doesn’t have any information from onstar (chevrolet) form y car. But it know it’s a bolt and my batterie level.
Yeah I saw about evnotify, this read information from all of these. Looking at it right now. Also looking at spinning a evcc docker in my unraid and play with it.
OCPP seems promising. I saw wallbox that seems to communicate with this.
EVCC seems to be able to communicate with a lot of wallbox. And for my understanding, evcc can read data and control the wallbox right? So since we have an integration in openhab, I could switch control everything through openhad in evcc?
No that is the name of the Car models I charge with my GoE charger.
Renault Zoe
MG 5
Ah, sorry about that, we don’t have many of those brand in Quebec
As far as I know EVCC has no load management. If you have two 11kW wallboxes charging and your house can only provide 22kW, you should have something like a load management which reduces the charging power if additional loads are switched on in the house.
Oh I don’t need that. I just need to be able to do a start/stop charging so when I get in the high pricing time, it stop charging.
so I just installed evcc and ran the demo and read the documentation (thank you translate on the fly). This thing seems to monitor everything but not do anything per say. It cannot connect to any chevrolet/onstar car for now and most of the supported box aren’t available in quebec. There is some, but they are on the low end (low amp).
I’ve started to reach manufacturer and for now, they all say they don’t have api or local access beside there own apps.
Just found out wallbox have an integration with homeassistant
Still require internet because it connect to the portal but it’s a beginning. It means it could be added to openhab through a binding