Hi @hesselonline,
Is it possible to add a feature to the integration to enable the unit to be restarted (not restored) from within HA? There is a bug with my Quasar charger which means it seemingly randomly goes to an error status. When I notice the error, I can either clear it by unplugging and reconnecting, or by restarting the unit.
It would be great if I could set up HA to monitor for the status showing as error, then initiate a reboot.
At the moment it is pot luck as to whether it faults in between me going to bed and it starting to charge during the cheap rate, so sometimes the car doesn’t get a charge overnight.
Many thanks for your great work on this integration!
hi @bubble07, the hass integration uses the wallbox pypi package to communicate with the wallbox api. AFAIK there is no restart capability in that pypi package, this would be required to make it available in hass.
Hi, for now I’m not planning on adding this as functionality. I raised this as a question in the Wallbox topic; who is interested in this feature. To me it seems a risky add-on → restart at wrong time might have bad results, so I’m trying to weigh the risks vs potential benefits here.
Thanks for all of your hard work on a great integration.
Sorry to revive an old thread, but I thought I’d post here to keep the requests for this feature in one place. I’d be really grateful if you would reconsider adding the restart feature to the integration in some way.
For me, I’ve woken up several times to find my charger in the red ring of death error state and my car without sufficient charge to get to work. The frustrating part, is that a reboot of the charger fixes the issue and allows it to continue charging. With this in mind, a restart feature would allow a safety net to ensure that a reboot occurs automatically if the charger has been in an error state for 10 minutes or so (to avoid boot loops), enabling me to wake up with a freshly charged car, even if the charger has a tantrum when trying to start charging in the middle of the night.
I know other people have the ring of death issue, as there are various posts on Reddit as well as bubble07 above. For me, the errors are especially frequent when trying to begin a charge in very cold weather (around -10°C), but a restart fixes the issue.
As a test, I restarted my charger using the app with bluetooth whilst it was charging. I was able to reinitiate charging from the Home Assistant dashboard without touching the car connection and without issue.
The Wallbox web interface automatically disables the restart functionality when charging is in progress, so it may be that the function in the pypi package also prevents accidental restarts while charging.
Hi, sorry for the late reply. I’m not really sure if I want to add this, I’m afraid something will break by an accidental activation. However, I will keep you request in mind.
i would solve this issue by measuring the Wallbox power consumption with Shelly EM and if it stops i would run an automation to disconnect and reconnect the Wallbox using a Shelly relay. By the way, the new Wallbox Quasar 2 is a game changer, many European countries are trying to ban it.
@hesselonline thanks for your consideration. If you change your mind, I will gladly buy you a coffee for your work.
@smarthoo that sounds like a great solution, but I’m not comfortable with a hardware mod on such a high power appliance. The shelly might not even be able to handle the current over a full charge. I think, for me, the wallbox will have to go in the trash and I’ll have to find a new charger that is compatible with home assistant, but more reliable, especially as this is clearly not an isolated issue.
I too had problems with wifi on my Wallbox Pulsar. And how much I’d like this feature to work, it is a useless request. Because when the error exists, the integration cannot communicate with the device. It simply won’t work. Bluetooth does work, so that is why the app is still able to do the reset.
There is a Wallbox integration beta based on BLE. I did ty that for a short period. But the problem with that is: while it is connected, it blocks all other bluetootn connections, so the app won’t work. Even if you stop the integration in HA, the app can no longer connect. So I stopped using it.
What did work for me is this: I bought a 2.4 gHz only wifi access point that I did not integrate in my mesh, and put it as close as I could to the Wallbox. Now, while very occasionally the wifi connection does still break, it automatically reconnects shortly after. There’s little else on this access point.
It is ridiculous that an esp with working wifi can be bought for €10, while a €900 device cannot properly maintain wifi connections, als does not allow for Ethernet either. Had I known, I’d probably bought some other brand. Wallbox has not fixed the problem in over a year on multiple chargers. It simply does not play nice with modern wifi routers.Any other device in the world does, even the Raspberry that they use as a basis for their devices.
Ps. I did test with an esp based wifi proxy. That did work but security wise that is a very poorly protected wifi access point. That is why, when I was confident enough it would solve my troubles, that I took the plunge and bought the extra wifi access point. It has proper encryption and security firmware updates.
My Wallbox goes into error mode every now and again. Then I have to hard reset it or reboot it by means of the app. It would be helpfull if I could reboot it via the wallbox integration when in error mode for some time. I could make an automation that would take care of that.
You argue that it might be “dangerous”. Restarting is an option in the official wallbox app, so maybe it is not that dangerous? Erwin_D says that it can’t communicate in Error mode, but this is certainly not always the case. How else could the integration know the “Error” status. Not by guessing.
I’ve got the Pulsar Plus for a couple of years now and every 3 to 4 days it loses Wifi connection and I need to restart it
This can be done via turning the power on and off or (if I’m close) via bluetooth.
I tried to isolate the Wallbox on a separate SSID and 2.4GHz router but still the Wifi adapter seems to crash. @RobMeerwijk proposes to use the API call for restarting the device but this won’t work if the device doesn’t have any Wifi to receive this command.
A command via Bluetooth from f.i. a nearby RaspberryPi might be a solution but I’m still looking for how I can execute commands to a Bluetooth MAC address