Project EV car charger

Hi all

I have a Wi-Fi home charger like this from project EV Project EV AC Electric Vehicle Charger 7.3kw 32A (Single Phase)

Has anyone tried to integrate this with HA?

No but I will be looking forward to this to if it happens. Project ev does integrate with a growatt serve which HA does have an integration for ? Don’t know if that’s any help to you.

We’ve just had one of these installed and would be interested to hear of any attempts to get it to talk to HA. there’s an app, and it’s connected to the WiFi, so there must be potential.

Ive not found anything yet.

I have just ordered one, and will be looking at linking it to Home Assistant as I have battery storage as well as solar and this won’t work with the solar mode on the charger without some coordination hence the use of HA.

I have found this manual
https://www.speakev.com/attachments/eva-07-s-manual-pdf.125863/
which describes the web interface which is provided directly on the charger at its fixed IP address (which is what we’d want from a HA point of view). However it says the configuration page may not be available without resetting the charger so using this configuration page for the integration is probably a nonstarter.

However the configuration page does allow the websockets server address for the Growatt server to be changed. This could be changed to the address of the HA instance and an integration could use that to get and send data from the charger by setting up a emulation of this websockets server - which could pass on the data to the Growatt server so the Project EV App would still work.

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Further update the Atess website who make the charger suggests it is Open Charge Point Protocol 1.6 compatible. In their version of the setup doc (not the Project EV one shared above) the back office server address is “ws://ess-charge.atesspower.com:80/ocpp/ws”;
There is an OCPP implementation for Home Assistant which could therefore work. See OCPP Server Plugin for linking electric car chargers!.
Not yet got my ProjectEV charger installed but will be trying this when I do.

UPDATE: I have now had a chance to test the ProjectEV charger with the OCPP Server plugin. Since this was a replacement of an existing charger I did the install myself. I connected my laptop via an ethernet and logged in to the charger to set up the OCPP server, connect the wifi and this was relatively easy. Using the OCPP server port default of 9000 the ProjectEV Charger connected to the Home Assistant OCPP server successfully. I was able to add the charger controls to my dashboard and see the availability of the charger and start and stop a charge. However the functionality to set the charge rate (maximum current) did not work.

After quite a bit of debugging I worked out that the ProjectEV Charger replies to configuration information requests with empty responses which in the first instance the ocpp server plugin assumes means the charger only supports the core functionality of the ocpp protocol. I made a few changes to the ocpp API source code in order to make it assume that the charger was smart and to enable it to cope with some of the other empty information messages, and now have the set charge rate slider working to adjust the rate of charges.

I have put these updates back into a branch of the ocpp server implementation and put in a pull request to get them incorporated into a later version. Should anyone want to use my updated API it is at: https://github.com/archerjm/ocpp_projectev

Thanks for doing this, i’ve set it up and have control of the charger which is great. Do you know if its possible to get any of the sensor data from it? It seems the ProjectEV app knew about the actual current being drawn and the voltage, so it must be sent over the API but home assistant isn’t getting these values.

I have added them to the HAChargerStatuses class in enum.py. That puts them on the Diagnostics Panel, and updated the master branch in https://github.com/archerjm/ocpp_projectev.

Those sensors work great, although my charge point under-reports by nearly an amp. It used to do that with the ProjectEV app too.

I can’t get the amp slider to work though - setting it appears to stick, but the charger never changes the current, and it doesn’t work if i adjust it prior to starting a charge either. I have tried with two cars, one of which a Tesla which tells me the “available amps” on any charger its plugged into, and unlike most chargers it starts at 6A on the ProjectEV and creeps up to 32A available, as if the charge point is just sending it higher and higher available amps as it draws more current.

Maybe i’ve set something wrong on the charge point itself?

Not sure what could be going on here. It works for me. Do you get any error messages?
My setup does not have any CT clamps on my charger and I have never used the ECO or ECO+ modes and I can’t see how to switch into/out of these modes from the OCPP standard. I have it disabled in the settings. I am running firmware EVA-07S-V4.2.9-20220610.

Sorry for the slow reply. It was firmware - I contacted ProjectEV and they asked me to reconnect to the growatt server to allow them to update, then I linked it to Home Assistant again and it worked just fine.

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Thanks for this thread, I just successfully followed this to integrate my project EV charger with HomeAssistant

Thanks for this, works great! Couple of questions :

  1. Is there a way to also have the Project EV app continue to work when changing the ws URL to Home Assistant? The charger shows up as “Unavailable” in the app for me.

  2. Any way to switch between Fast / Eco+ modes using this integration? I also have a Growatt inverter + solar so ideally excess solar charge can charge the EV during the day, with cheaper off-peak/green grid charging overnight to top it up (7.5p/kWh from Octopus Intelligent between 11.30pm-5.30am)

Ideally, looking for ways to automate switching back and forth between Fast/Eco+ on the EV charger between day/night, via Home Assistant (or otherwise) instead of in the Project EV app manually every day.

Thanks again for the great integration! :slight_smile:

I cannot get this integration to work with my Growatt Thor 11 EV Charger. Can someone send me a screenshot with the basic settings to get me on my way?
Thanks in advance.

What firmware do you have now?And only power ev can update it or there is site where I can download it?

Have you got an answer to this?
I would also like the OCPP integration in Home Assistant to work with my Growatt Thor EVA-11S EV Charger
I have change the “Server URL(MaxLen 250):” on the Growatt Thor charger parameters to “ws://:9000”
And it can read some of the parameters as entities in HA, but I’m not able to stop/start charching, change from 6A, 7A, 8A up til 16A dependent on my powerinput from mit Growatt Solar system. I’m using Solar Assitant and have Live PV solar data in HA already, and would like to auto change charging speed on my Thor changer depending on the PV power input.
Any idears?