Hello,
A more discussion-oriented topic to start with and gauge interest: would an « EV Charging Station » integration be of interest to anyone?
Several questions then arise from this project:
- OK, but for what? Initially, I think it would mainly be for « data consumption »… but maybe that’s not enough?
- OK, but what kind of integration?
- Fully integrated with Gladys: Gladys hosts the code on its side… not sure if that’s a great idea, but why not in absolute terms. Maybe it’s the most integrated in the end?
- In ocpp2mqtt mode: a bit like Zigbee and Z-Wave: we rely on another project that acts as a CSMS and publishes messages on an MQTT broker. The broker can also be used to send commands to the charging station. In this mode, the charging station no longer communicates with the station’s native cloud server.
- In Relay 2 mqtt mode: in this mode, a program acts as an intermediary to transmit messages to the MQTT broker while allowing messages to pass to the native cloud. Gladys can, a priori, only receive messages, not send them to the charging station (in absolute terms, yes, but desynchronized with the cloud CSMS… not sure about the impacts).
- Via Node-RED? In which case, there’s nothing really to do in Gladys, more of a tutorial question? (I just thought of this solution while writing the post, I admit)
I’ve started some initial research, I’m still having a bit of trouble identifying everything that could be done with the protocol (knowing that there are 2/3 versions of it). Receiving data seems more or less OK. It’s more in sending commands that I haven’t dug into what can be done, but in principle, why not. Hence this post: are people interested? What information can be retrieved? What commands can be pushed?
For the different options, there are more or less different ways to proceed:
- Full Gladys integration: probably based on mikuso/ocpp-rpc: A Node.js client & server implementation of the WAMP-like RPC-over-websocket system defined in the OCPP-J protocols.
- ocpp2mqtt:
- gyzod/ocpp2mqtt: OCPP <==> MQTT Gateway: but limited to OCPP 1.6
- Create a separate project dedicated to Gladys (based on GitHub - mikuso/ocpp-rpc: A Node.js client & server implementation of the WAMP-like RPC-over-websocket system defined in the OCPP-J protocols. · GitHub …)
- relay2mqtt:
- The solution integrated by HA to Dockerize: michael-adler/ha-ocpp-relay: Home Assistant integration that collects OCPP sensor data while acting as an OCPP relay between an EV charger and a management server.
- node-red: via node-red-contrib-ocpp2 (node) - Node-RED
- I’m going to explore this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XE-VSfIcCkU
That’s it, I don’t have answers, I don’t have a completely clear solution yet… I’m just gauging interest to see if there’s any.
