tillsteinbach
Charging station automatic real kWh and cost provisionning
Hello,
VWsFriend is an awesome tool, allowing me to keep a track of charges and refueling of my PHEV. But as a PHEV owner, I'm charging every night at home. I added a custom "Home" charging station, which is detected automatically, but I need to calculate manually the cost of charge every morning.
As a suggestion, would it be possible to add a webhook for some charging stations (or operators) that would be called at the end of each charge? That would allow to for home stations:
- Fetch real kWh consumption from a connected power meter
- Calculate the cost depending on the off-peak/peak power prices That also could allow for charges on public stations to get the real price or eventually estimated price.
To get a more accurate price, we could imagine that the payload of the webhook could contain the estimated kWh charged for each time frame of charge (if a charge is during both during peak and off-peak with different prices; often happens on public stations).
Actually this is on my list. For Elli chargers and WeCharge this would be even possible with reasonable effort. The challenge is that I cannot implement, test and maintain several systems I don't have access to. So the way to go would be a plugin system where people could add support for such systems.
I currently have very limited time, but I keep your proposal for the future.
A maybe more lightweight way would be the possibility to import exports from other sources e.g. in csv format.
The plugin system is what I had in mine while writing this idea, through the help of webhook (making it fully customisable even for any brand home chargers).
Using something like https://robotframework.org/ to read the data from a website might be an option for some networks. It would be a brittle implementation prone to break at any time with a new UI remodeling.
Using something like https://robotframework.org/ to read the data from a website might be an option for some networks. It would be a brittle implementation prone to break at any time with a new UI remodeling.
Sounds like a great approach, but indeed if networks don't have any available public APIs, any implementation is prone to break.
Hell, even when they have public API, implemntations are prone to break due to unannounced changes.