WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:13.120 All right. Hello everyone. I'm Christian Wiseman. I work on a project called Citrinos. 00:13.120 --> 00:18.200 We are an open source charge station management system. And last year I was here to give 00:18.200 --> 00:23.760 a talk, kind of introducing it. We were very fresh. And this year I can give you one year 00:23.760 --> 00:28.760 of progress and what we kind of did over the last year and how much fun we have had. 00:28.760 --> 00:35.600 All right. Just for the formalities, I'm a contributor to Citrinos. I'm also one of the 00:35.600 --> 00:41.400 original people who were like, we should do something about this. I'm a senior software 00:41.400 --> 00:46.680 engineer at a company called S44 Energy. So we do EV charging things and other energy 00:46.680 --> 00:54.200 things. And I've been working on EV charging for roughly combined seven years. So I've 00:54.200 --> 01:03.000 seen some things. All right. So maybe, or probably, lots of you know about this, the EV charging 01:03.000 --> 01:08.800 landscape, but just to run you through kind of our problem statement, I'm a driver. I just 01:08.800 --> 01:15.680 got this new car. And I'm doing a road trip to Brussels. So on the way, I probably need to 01:15.680 --> 01:22.160 charge. And for that, I'm going to sign a contract with the EMSP, the E mobility service 01:22.160 --> 01:27.720 provider that tells me where I can charge and that builds me. And so they might give me an 01:27.720 --> 01:32.800 RFID card or just an app and say, all right, you're good to charge. So then I drive 01:32.800 --> 01:39.680 direction Brussels and I get to a charging station. All right. So now I have my RFID card 01:39.720 --> 01:46.400 and first I plug in or after, but important part is I plug in for completeness. And maybe 01:46.400 --> 01:54.720 in the other talks you've heard, the car talks a protocol either IEC 61851 or ISO 15118 01:54.720 --> 02:02.160 with a charger. And then I hold up my RFID card to say, all right, it's me. You can please 02:02.160 --> 02:07.960 charge my car. I will pay for it. And then there's the charger that talks a protocol called 02:08.000 --> 02:13.760 OCPP, the open charge point protocol to a charge point operator. It was managing all the 02:13.760 --> 02:19.840 charge points. Then the charge point operator reaches out to the EMSP and asks, hey, is this 02:19.840 --> 02:25.640 person good for their money or will you at least guarantee giving me money for this electricity 02:25.640 --> 02:35.480 and the EMSP is, yeah sure. All good. All right. So you see, there's lots of protocols. 02:35.480 --> 02:42.600 And yet they're not that fun to implement. I mean, it's fun the first time, but after that it's 02:42.600 --> 02:48.600 kind of repeating the same thing. And the actual bigger problem is everyone looks at these protocols 02:48.600 --> 02:52.840 and think they're art and so they interpret them a little bit differently. And then you have to 02:52.840 --> 02:57.960 build an ifs that if the charger starts with this serial number, then it's probably that 02:57.960 --> 03:03.000 manufacturer. And yeah, then they will send this message first and that's kind of not great. 03:03.800 --> 03:11.480 And so we thought someone should do something about this. And our part is basically the cloud 03:11.480 --> 03:18.440 CPO part. So our main idea was OCPP is complicated and complex and there's a new version 03:19.240 --> 03:25.880 new as in 2018, 2020, but it hasn't really been adopted by the industry. So someone should do 03:25.880 --> 03:31.480 something about it to make it easier to adopt this. And that's where we came in. We saw there's 03:31.560 --> 03:35.960 another project called Everest that's doing something similar but on the charger side. 03:36.760 --> 03:43.640 And so basically we were inspired like, hey, that's a good idea. We should also do something like that, 03:43.640 --> 03:54.760 but for up here. All right. So we're the charge station management system. We are basically in 03:54.760 --> 04:04.040 the cloud. And so we use some cloud technologies. So the charger itself talks to the OCPP router, 04:04.040 --> 04:12.600 OCPP. OCPP is on web sockets. And our main thought was OCPP 201. That's the thing we want to do. 04:12.600 --> 04:18.680 And so that's what we've implemented. Because for 1.6, there's some other soaps stuff, but 04:19.640 --> 04:23.320 yeah, we don't want to do that. I hope no one does that really anymore. 04:24.840 --> 04:34.680 All right. So then OCPP arrives at our OCP router and then we basically pop it on a message bus 04:34.680 --> 04:40.200 and our modules then can take it from the message bus do things and then respond. 04:40.680 --> 04:49.000 The idea is that the modules are then exposing a rest API and that way you can extend it or 04:49.000 --> 05:00.200 interact with it without being tied into our setup. So our core idea is the implementation part 05:00.200 --> 05:05.320 of running at the implementation of a protocol shouldn't be the hard part of running a 05:05.320 --> 05:11.560 charge station management. It should be basically easy part. If you're running a charging network, 05:11.560 --> 05:16.120 you should make your network good because you did something special, not because you implemented 05:16.120 --> 05:23.240 a protocol because that should be the baseline. All right. So for that, we basically split up our 05:23.240 --> 05:30.120 code base into different layers. So you can pick any layer of them and extend or build on top. 05:30.120 --> 05:36.040 And so we have kind of just the base of where we have the data structures, then some persistence 05:36.040 --> 05:43.400 on integrating with the database. Right now we're kind of going or leaning heavily on Postgres 05:43.400 --> 05:54.040 because there's some post-just things that we like around geospatial. And then we have some 05:54.040 --> 05:59.160 mutals just to provide functionalities like for certificate things. And then we have the actual 05:59.160 --> 06:07.640 module that is the top layer that's exposing the rest API. And because we have the different modules, 06:07.640 --> 06:13.640 they're basically split similar along the lines of the protocol. You can scale them individually. 06:13.640 --> 06:18.520 So you can build a server with each module if you want. And then you have the transaction module 06:18.600 --> 06:26.360 that gets hammered for a lot of times. Scale really high while the configuration module just hangs 06:26.360 --> 06:34.520 out. All right. I need to speed up a bit. So and the other cool thing is since everything's on the 06:34.520 --> 06:40.120 message broker, you can add your own modules. Like we had someone add a payment module that hooks 06:40.120 --> 06:46.520 into the message broker and then does the stripe integration but just interacts on the message broker 06:46.600 --> 06:53.480 and you don't have to hack anything in. You just attach. All right. So what happened over the last year? 06:53.480 --> 06:58.280 So we're now part of the Linux Foundation Energy. So we now have technical steering committees. 06:59.320 --> 07:05.560 We also release the one dot over version and now we're on one dot five dot one I believe. 07:06.920 --> 07:16.200 Yeah, we also traveled quite a bit to basically try our stuff. So we've been testing at places like the 07:16.280 --> 07:24.760 Open EV charging summit in Texas. We went to a plug fest in Bodshurnborn in Germany where 07:24.760 --> 07:32.520 that Everest was hosting. We went to a plug fest in the US and plug fest are where basically 07:32.520 --> 07:39.480 charger manufacturers and CSMS or people, they test their stuff. So you sit around a table for 07:39.480 --> 07:44.840 two hours and then you say, all right, now give me electricity click and then you hope that the message 07:44.920 --> 07:53.320 exchange correctly and the light bulb goes on. So that was really fun. And then we were at a conference 07:53.320 --> 08:02.680 in Berlin promoting USB-P201 and also at the LFE summit in Brussels. Also we've done some webinars 08:02.680 --> 08:07.960 on the protocols just because we like the protocols and we want to push people forward to 08:07.960 --> 08:16.600 the good versions of the protocols. All right, and so we in the meantime have also implemented 08:16.600 --> 08:23.560 the full protocol also things like advanced user interface where you can show QR codes on the user 08:23.560 --> 08:33.640 interface of the charger. We've implemented OCPI so that out part of the CPO and because for 08:33.720 --> 08:40.280 getting certified you have to have a UI and not just a directness on top of a database, 08:40.280 --> 08:47.960 we also had to build our own UI but now we're certified. So the OCA that maintains that protocols 08:47.960 --> 08:54.680 said cool, your implementation rocks and we're also starting to get contributions from the outside 08:54.680 --> 09:02.840 world. So if you're seeing this, thanks a lot and you're awesome. All right, in the lessons learned 09:04.200 --> 09:10.120 well not everyone wants to be on the forefront of implementing a protocol. It's hard to move 09:10.120 --> 09:17.480 people forward even if the protocol is just a lot better. And so yeah that's definitely one thing 09:17.480 --> 09:24.120 we've learned. We've also been explaining what open sources a lot and UIs are quite important. 09:24.120 --> 09:29.080 A lot of people see something shiny and then they're happy but the underlying technology is not 09:29.080 --> 09:33.320 so important and we went with the technology first. So now we're building the shiny part on top. 09:35.800 --> 09:42.440 And yeah we try to be very open in all directions which like for postgres we're kind of narrowing 09:42.440 --> 09:49.560 down in one direction. So what's next? All right, release 1.6 is next and with that because not 09:49.640 --> 09:57.880 everyone is on the forefront of to a one. We're also implementing OCP 1.6 and you can see a screenshot 09:59.480 --> 10:06.840 I connected my home charger the other day to Citrine. All right and yeah then we're implementing 10:06.840 --> 10:13.720 some other protocols and especially adding to the new UI. If you want to get involved join the 10:13.720 --> 10:19.400 Discord server there's a QR code and make a pull request and especially attend our technical 10:19.400 --> 10:26.440 steering committees. They're first Thursday every month 6 p.m. UTC so you're a time it's good 10:26.440 --> 10:33.560 U.S. it's a bit gotta get up early. All right I'm out of time I'll be hanging out outside 10:33.560 --> 10:38.520 if you want to talk about CSMS or anything else. Thanks.