EV Charging Station Administration using OCPP 1.6 with SteVe

As part of our mission to experiment with “alternative” electric vehicle charging station communications technologies we’ve been searching for open source software for the “server” end of things that supports OCPP 1.6. We’d been looking at the ChargeTime Java server from Thomas Volden when news reached us that the SteVe project from the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen had just been updated to (mostly) support OCPP 1.6. As the ReadMe puts it:

SteVe was developed at the RWTH Aachen University and means Steckdosenverwaltung, namely socket administration in German. The aim of SteVe is to support the deployment and popularity of electric mobility, so it is easy to install and to use. SteVe provides basic functions for the administration of charge points, user data, and RFID cards for user authentication and was tested successfully in operation.

SteVe is considered as an open platform to implement, test and evaluate novel ideas for electric mobility, like authentication protocols, reservation mechanisms for charge points, and business models for electric mobility. SteVe is distributed under GPL and is free to use. If you are going to deploy SteVe we are happy to see the logo on a charge point.

We eagerly cloned SteVe from GitHub and carefully followed the instructions. Working from the Scientific Linux command line it took a while for Maven to do its thing and then SteVe burst into life at the very first time of asking!

SteVeStartup

Next we tried SteVe on our trusty Raspberry Pi 3B. Whilst we have previously successfully used MySQL on a RasPi on this occasion it seemed prudent to configure SteVe to use the existing database on our Linux server. Having allowed him through our firewall once again SteVe immediately burst into life without further ado.

It took slightly more work to get him working inside Eclipse. We had to set up a suitable “Maven Build” configuration:

SteVeMaven

which produced this by way of console output:

SteVeConsole

The only slight fly in the ointment at the moment is that SteVe doesn’t yet support OCPP 1.6 charging profiles:

SteVeProfile

However we confidently anticipate that issue being solved in the not too distant future! As a side effect of this exercise we have also produced a forked version of the ChargeTime OCPP client, together with a modest demonstration “charging station”. Please feel free to check them out at:

https://github.com/V2G-Ltd/Java-OCA-OCPP

and

https://github.com/V2G-Ltd/OCPP-1.6-EVSE-Demo

That all works fine for us on our Azul Zulu equipped Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3.

20 thoughts on “EV Charging Station Administration using OCPP 1.6 with SteVe”

  1. Hi Jim,

    Do you have information on how to import the Steve project into eclipse and setup the maven build?

    Thanks
    Nick

    Reply

    1. Hi Nick,

      My profuse apologies. Your comment got lost in amongst the vast quantities of spam comments we receive every day.

      Have you solved your Eclipse problem yet?

      Jim

      Reply

    2. Hi Nick,

      To be honest I thought I’d already covered that above, so it looks like we’ll have to delve a bit deeper!

      Based on your email you want to run SteVe on a Raspberry Pi, whilst doing the development in Eclipse on A.N.Other machine.

      1) Have I got that much straight? If so please can you elaborate on A.N.Other? What OS and what version of Eclipse for example.

      2) Where will the MySQL database that SteVe requires be running?

      Jim

      Reply

      1. Hi Jim,

        Eclipse is running on a Windows 10 pc the version of eclipse is
        Version: 2018-12 (4.10.0)

        The database is running on the pi.

        The options are I think:
        1.Develop, debug, build (mvn) deploy on the PC with local database running on the PC. Then when happy all is ok copy source across to PI and build uding MVN
        2. Develop, debug, build (mvn) deploy via a debug session to the PI from the PC, this is a lot more involved getting the connection setup?

        Is this correct ?

        Thanks for your help.

        Nick

        Reply

        2. I have manually installed Azul Zulu embedded 11, and I find I have a different problem to contend with:

          It’s over to SteVe support for me now I think!

          P.S Having checked out SteVe@GitHub it sounds like this is a duplicate of Issue #101. From the ReadMe:

          At least MySQL 5.7.7 (MariaDB 10.2.1 or later works as well) as database.

          Raspbian currently seems to be using MariaDB 10.1.37

          P.P.S. See the responses over at: https://github.com/RWTH-i5-IDSG/steve/issues/124

          Reply

          1. As suggested by SteVe support, I’ve just tried to build 3.2.0 on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. This is how far I get:

      2. Good afternoon, Jim,

        has doubts regarding SteVe how this software is implemented,
        and how it does the incrementation with the database.

        Thank you.

        [Edited project name – Mod]

        Reply

  2. hey hi,

    i want to know about ocpp 2.0 with steve. is any open source software available for ocpp 2.0
    if yes then please give the indetails about that.

    thank you.

    with regards,
    Ganesh R

    Reply

    1. Hi Ganesh,

      I don’t think the SteVe team have any plans to move to OCPP 2.0 yet.

      However Thomas Volden of ChargeTime.eu has started to move in that direction. See the first paragraph above for a link.

      Reply

  3. We were lucky enough to get hold of one of the first batch of 4GB Raspberry Pi 4 “desktop capable” single board computers. Given the correspondence above the first thing we tried was to install MariaDB and then SteVe on the new “Buster” version of the Raspbian operating system. Everything worked fine except that the first time we started SteVe it died reporting a timezone mismatch between SteVe and Java. We fixed that as follows:

    sudo leafpad /etc/mysql/mariadb.conf.d/50-server.cnf
    then add to the [mysqld] section:
    default-time-zone='+00:00'

    The next thing on our TODO list is to discover whether native Eclipse development on a 4Gb equipped RasPi 4 is realistic or not!

    Reply

  4. Hi Jim,

    i want to know the information about this.
    SteVe does support OCPP 1.6 charging profiles or not….
    if it is then please revert the link to me .

    thank you.

    Regards,
    Ganesh R.

    Reply

    1. Thanks very much for the heads up Serge.

      Building that lot is something to add near the top of my extensive TODO list!

      MongoDB for the backend makes a nice change from MariaDB/MySQL?!

      Reply

    1. Hi Aleš,

      Would I be correct in thinking that your EV Drive solution costs a lot more than SteVe and/or SAP Labs open source offerings?

      Reply

  8. Hello JIM!

    Last week i setup Steve on my raspberry PI.
    I have got a real charger. Could you help me in the connection between the charger and the STEVE server?
    My main problem, when i upload to the charger the URL the charger can’t connet to the STEVE servel, and i don’t know waht is the problem.

    Reply

  9. Good morning,

    i’m trying to configure a chargepoint on steVe ocpp server with curl (in php if possible) and i’m wondering if someone knows how to do that.

    best regards.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.