With hardware-agnostic software ChargeLab hopes to simplify and streamline charging hardware set-up for the industry

Today, ChargeLab released its open-source, hardware-agnostic OpenOCPP software to the EV charging market.

The aim of the Canadian software developer is to make it faster and more efficient for charging networks to expand in North America, removing bottlenecks from microcontroller limitations to certification complexity in the process.

“OpenOCPP transforms OCPP adoption for EV charger manufacturers from an 18–24 month integration challenge to a weeks-long sprint,” said Ehsan Mokthari, CTO of ChargeLab and co-chair of the Open Charge Alliance’s OCPP 2.lite working group, in a press release.

“We’ve designed an incredibly memory-efficient embedded software stack that can run on any underlying hardware, from a lightweight ESP32 microcontroller to a full Linux embedded system. OpenOCPP comes with enterprise-grade security pre-built, making it truly ready for rapid adoption by EV charger manufacturers.”

The issue with OCPP

Every EV charger, regardless of network or brand, requires a way of communicating with back-end platforms for operations like billing and measuring energy consumption.

To do this, some chargers use open charge point protocol (OCPP). In theory so long as the charger and the backend service both “speak” OCPP, they can be made to work together.

The issue is that not all OCPP codes are created equal and the variances are leading to significant bottlenecks and delays in getting new EV charging infrastructure online.

Enter ChargeLab’s release of OpenOCPP, which is looking to make a standardized OCPP freely available and accessible to charging station makers around the world.

“It’s trying to give a gift to the whole industry,” says Zak Lefevre, co-founder of ChargeLab, in an interview with Electric Autonomy.

“If we can give manufacturers something for free that helps them get more standardized and more compliant, it’s going to come back and benefit us. On the back end, it’s going to be easier for us to integrate with all these different charger types.”

How to access OpenOCPP

There is no doubt that releasing OpenOCPP will benefit ChargeLab’s competitors; Lefevre says having open access to OpenOCPP could save companies as much as $500,000 in developing their own OCPP software.

The deal ChargeLab is offering to the industry is simple, says Lefevre: Charging station makers and backend providers don’t need to engage, hire or otherwise interface with ChargeLab at all.

Using OpenOCPP doesn’t lock you into a contract or bind charging hardware manufacturers to any specific backend provider.

In short, he says, OpenOCPP exists to “reduce the friction,” much like Tesla purported it was doing when it released the North American Charging Standard for free on its website.

So, how does one get access to the ChargeLab OpenOCPP software?

Companies, university researchers and individuals interested in using OpenOCPP can simply download the code from a public GitHub repository.

The repository link and more information about the project is available at www.openocpp.com.

It’s a generous deal that almost seems too good to be true, but when pressed on that point, Lefevre says there is no fine print and this initiative is born from a philosophical understanding that the national public charging network is only as strong as its weakest charger.

The only way to ensure success for all is to try to give each charger the best possible chance to operate smoothly and consistently, regardless if it’s directly benefiting your company or not.

“ChargeLab is in the business of providing software to manage EV chargers,” says Lefevre.

“Hopefully we will start seeing more EV charger manufacturers start to comply more closely with OCPP and you’ll start hearing of less problems.”