Pionix designs and builds EV charging solutions on the open-source EVerest stack – from drivers and hardware bring-up to certification and long-term support.
Download our whitepaper on Software-Defined Charging, including practical applications & examples.
// What changes when the same software drives a wallbox, a fast charger, and a multi-stall site without modification. A Pionix perspective.
A few months ago, the team at Pionix sat down with our CTO and watched him do something we'd been talking about for months but the real magic was only unfolding when we finally saw it in action.
He connected a Pionix ChargeBridge module on its devboard as part of a prototype AC charger to his laptop via Ethernet. LFE EVerest, the open-source charging stack we have initiated and are maintaining since 2020, and is now hosted by the Linux Foundation Energy, started running on his Linux laptop. He brought up an OCPP session, ran an ISO 15118-2 handshake with the connected EV, the whole flow, including charging. Then, without changing a line of configuration, he connected to a second ChargeBridge module mounted on a prototype DC charger. Another independent charging port on the same laptop, talking to the same EVerest instance, running the same software.
Then he switched hosts. He SSH'd into a Proxmox VM sitting in our office rack and started the identical EVerest configuration there, against the same two modules. The modules didn't care they had changed hosts. The software didn't care that the modules had moved. From the operator's perspective, nothing had changed at all. He could even seamlessly shift the EVerest VM from one Proxmox instance to another, while charging, without any issues.
So he could power different chargers with totally different hardware by using the same software and ChargeBridge module - and even shift the whole software to run on a different computer while charging a car without breaking anything!
This was the culmination of years of development, with one goal: Decoupling hardware from software as a key to enabling these demos and actual, real world applications.
And this is what the future years of EV charging look like. The rest of this piece explains why charger companies, CPOs, and fleet operators should be paying attention now. And why this new way of doing things comes with many benefits.
We call it Software-Defined Charging.
Want to read more? Download the full whitepaper here →
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