Testing with EVerest

In the case you don’t have a charger that supports OCPP 2.0.1 to experiment with, we can recommend using the Linux Foundation Energy project EVerest. See here for the repository. They have built an open source version of charger firmware and also allow for using it as a simulator. They support OCPP 2.0.1 which makes it a great testing opportunity with CitrineOS. For the long route of setting up EVerst you can follow their documentation and build the project yourself. See here for Docs

Running EVerest

In order to alleviate some of the complexities that may arise when starting EVerest, we have created some helpful commands that should help in getting the EVerest charger simulator running locally and targeting CitrineOS.

You will notice in /Server/everest directory the files created to support running EVerest within Docker. In addition, we created some helpful NPM commands:

  • npm run start-everest
  • and
  • npm run start-everest-windows

Both of which in essence do the same thing which is to trigger the docker compose up command (below) from within the /Server/everest directory so that it can pick up the Dockerfile and the docker-compose.yml files.

You will notice that there are two args that are configurable:

  • EVEREST_IMAGE_TAG - The image tag that will be used for the EVerest image (ghcr.io/everest/everest-demo/manager).
  • EVEREST_TARGET_URL - The CSMS URL that EVerest will connect to. Defaults to host.docker.internal assuming CitrineOS will run on same machine, since localhost won’t work within Docker.

After running npm run start-everest (or the Windows alternative), you should see 3 running EVerest containers and the manager container should have the appropriate EVerest logs.

EVerest UI

Now that the 3 containers are running in Docker, you should be able to navigate to [localhost|ip]:1880/ui/ to view the EVerest simulator UI. There, you should be able to simulate the pause/resume and plug/unplug events among others.

EVerest NodeRed

You can also view the EVerest NodeRed UI [localhost|ip]:1880/, but it is not advisable to make any adjustments here unless you have a good understanding of this configuration.

Viewing OCPP logs in EVerest

To view the OCPP logs in EVerest, we have utilized Node http-server, which you will see being initialized in the Dockerfile. We initialize a simple HTTP server on port 8888 and expose this port so that it is mapped in the compose file allowing you to navigate to localhost:8888. This HTTP server is configured to serve the contents of the /tmp/everest_ocpp_logs which is where EVerest stores the OCPP logs in the Docker container. Conveniently, the logs are in HTML format, so we can easily view them in the browser.

Running EVerest Manually

You can also use their demo repository that hosts a Docker packaged EVerest image. See here for Github Repo

To get EVerest running on the side while developing and making changes, you can follow the steps below.

  1. Run your CitrineOS instance locally with docker compose up -d in the CitrineOS repository.
  2. Clone the EVerest Demo repository and cd into the repo.
  3. With CitrineOS running execute an “add charger” script at ./citrineos/add-charger.sh This adds a charger, location and password for the charger to CitrineOS.
  4. Bring up EVerest with docker compose --project-name everest-ac-demo --file "docker-compose.ocpp201.yml" up -d.
  5. Copy over the appropriate device model with docker cp manager/device_model_storage_citrineos_sp1.db \ everest-ac-demo-manager-1:/ext/source/build/dist/share/everest/modules/OCPP201/device_model_storage.db.
  6. Start EVerst having OCPP2.0.1 support with docker exec everest-ac-demo-manager-1 sh /ext/source/build/run-scripts/run-sil-ocpp201.sh.