I certainly hope this isn’t redundant. And maybe someone will find it useful.
First, I’m pleased to report that. after at least a dozen hours of effort, I finally have HA’s OCPP integration working with a Grizzl-E EV charger. (That’s three acronyms in one sentence. Not bad.)
Kudos to the integration’s developer. You do nice work. Not so the United Chargers’ coder. First, look at this image.
This is all you need to make the OCPP integration work with a Grizzl-E charger. Not a character less–especially that slash at the end of the URL. Don’t omit it. You’ll be sorry if you do. My charger, at least, goes offline. A clever coder would have tested for the trailing slash and, if it was missing, would have added one. By the way, the IP address is that of your HA server.
Once things are working, there are still major difficulties. My charger now reboots every 38 seconds. The charger’s LED changes from blue to magenta for a fraction of a second, accompanied by an HA notification–
plus ~100 lines added to the log. I shut down the server to see if the OCPP integration was triggering the reboots, and discovered that the magenta LED no longer means only that the charger is offline. It also indicates that there’s no OCPP connection. And since the LED is already magenta, there’s no way to tell if charger is rebooting. (Note to UC coder: you still have yellow and orange to work with.) Observe that, when it’s in this state, the charger’s home page–
Interesting! I must have a different version of the charger as I don’t see this. The UI is completely different. I reached out the the manufacture and they said that changing the OCPP server would possibly be coming in a future update.
Doesn’t your charger’s firmware revision show up on its home page.?
My charger’s ESP32 board has a USB socket, presumably to allow firmware to be flashed at the factory. If (a) your charger is the same, and (b) you’re both bold and persuasive, perhaps you can convince a United Chargers employee to e-mail you upgraded firmware and instructions about how to flash it.
As for your second paragraph: I thank you for the tip. It looks like the charger is sending invalid JSON to the OCPP integration. My current theory is that the charger reboots when the integration says something is wrong. But maybe I’ll have another theory tomorrow.
I just sent a note to UC including a sample of their garbled JSON, as well as three screenshots which should convince someone that the latest version of their Android application (which was released in the last few days) is badly broken. It claims that my charger is offline, when I’m quite certain it isn’t. Although I know better than to volunteer, I even offered to be a beta tester.
What’s the verdict on this charger? I am looking to replace my Tesla gen2 with something I can feed excess solar–locally. Surprisingly there isn’t much discussion on this topic, but it looks to be between this charger and OpenEVSE if you want local control.