OCPP proxy (or a similar functionality)

[nagisa]

Hey,

I'm using a OCPP-only EVSE – ChargeAmps Aura. So far connecting it up to evcc went alright and everything seems to be working as advertised. Thank you!

However, even before I deployed evcc I had my EVSE connected to a node-red instance, giving me a fair bit of custom control and insight into the EVSE. I had some workflows to:

1. Send measurements and status of the EVSE to Influx (eyeing a migration to Clickhouse, though) for later plotting in Grafana;
   • This could potentially be substituted by either the measurements that evcc exposes over mqtt or have it write directly to influx
   • However at the same time evcc does not appear to handle or expose measurements like EVSE temperature;
2. Adjust the EVSE illumination settings to only turn on LEDs when there's motion;
   • This in particular seems well out of scope for evcc;
3. Initiate a firmware update;
   • Similarly, well out of scope for evcc;
   • Though I can imagine temporarily reconfiguring the OCPP endpoint back to node-red for the occasional update.

One problem, though. OCPP is a many-EVSE-to-one-controller sorta protocol. So I can't have my Aura connected to both evcc and node-red at the same time, even if they wouldn't interfere with each other otherwise.

This limitation is quite similar to the issue that seems to have motivated creation of the modbusproxy component. Which brings me to the idea at hand. Would it make sense to implement a proxy for OCPP, similar to what was done for modbusproxy? It likely wouldn't be a fully transparent relay – evcc would still need to intercept and specially handle commands that change the amperage for a given charge session, but special cases like these are mostly an exception and most of the messages could be passed through as-is.

Maybe there are other straightforward solutions that I've missed in my search?

[JSmid6]

So my use case is a bit different but we have an Wallbox EVSE which is configured with OCPP to enable billing to e-flux. This allows for automatic payments for the charging sessions with my company car or for visitors. However, I can't add my EVSE to EVCC now because OCPP is already configured with the e-flux endpoint. Would your proposal for a proxy solve this as well?

[nagisa]

Yes, I imagine evcc could proxy-forward all the session logic to your e-flux while only handling energy balancing.

[galadril]

Im actually looking for this as well as I have my Ratio io6 connected with e-flux road as backoffice to handle the automated invoicing as well.

[galadril]

Im wondering if evcc can control my charger via OCPP when i set e-flux by road as the one handling the authentication.. (so it set e-flux by road to be the OCPP leader, and volt time is then the follower)

[tygoegmond]

Hey @galadril,

It works indeed great thanks.. aldo my Ratio io6 weirdly enough does not push kwh usage details via OCPP...

I'm not certain whether the Ratio io6 supports Current.Import in MeterValuesSampledData, but this could explain why the data isn't appearing. I'd recommend checking the device specifications or reaching out to Ratio directly about OCPP meter value support.

Im wondering if evcc can control my charger via OCPP when i set e-flux by road as the one handling the authentication.. (so it set e-flux by road to be the OCPP leader, and volt time is then the follower)

That setup should work fine. The authentication leader/follower configuration only affects authorization functions (Authorize, StartTransaction), not charging control commands. I'd suggest keeping E-Flux as the leader since that's already working for you.

Let me know if you'd like me to help investigate further!

[galadril]

@tygoegmond thanks for your help, ive started another topic not to hyjack this one :)
#21959

[JSmid6]

So it's not working consistently with a Wallbox Pulsar. For one it's not reading the power delivered properly (allways off by a few hundred watts,) and sometimes it will start charging without having any solar surplus even though EVCC is set to Solar mode and I'm getting a lot of Planner 401 errors (presumably the connection to plugchoice, though I'm not sure.) It'd be great if the proxy functionality that plugchoice offers is implemented in EVCC.

[tygoegmond]

So it's not working consistently with a Wallbox Pulsar. For one it's not reading the power delivered properly (allways off by a few hundred watts,) and sometimes it will start charging without having any solar surplus even though EVCC is set to Solar mode and I'm getting a lot of Planner 401 errors (presumably the connection to plugchoice, though I'm not sure.) It'd be great if the proxy functionality that plugchoice offers is implemented in EVCC.

Could you please send me an email at tygo@volttime.com with the charger’s details? I’d like to take a look for you.

[nagisa]

FWIW if a proxy like this would be useful to you, consider upvoting this discussion.

[rnndchsrl]

I also like the idea of an OCPP proxy - i own a Wallbox which is connected to Octopus Energy via OCPP - would be great to have the statistics and additional control in EVCC.