More Ecotality braindamage and incompetence
The web server on my Blink EVSE has been broken for the past several months. (EVSE = Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment, a fancy term for the now-standard-but-special extension cord used to charge an electric car.) Whenever I tried to connect to it, I got a "500 Server Error" message.
(Note added in response to a comment: no, this is not a joke. The extension cord that charges my electric car really does have a web server -- only worse. Read on...)
Thinking maybe the network configuration got screwed up, last night I went to the keypad to reprogram it.
This took only the better part of an hour. Maybe the touch screen has gotten dirty, but I had a tough time getting it to see my finger. And when it did, it would usually sense it twice, very rapidly. The "buttons" seemed smaller than with the last software version, and the calibration seemed to have drifted; I had to offset my finger a little to get the right letters.
It took me a while to realize this as I had been trying to enter my rather lengthy WiFi network password, and like most computers today it blots out password echoes "for security". This ensures that I'm the only person who can't possibly see it. Have you ever tried to type your password on a malfunctioning keyboard?
A half hour later, I finally could go back inside to my web browser. Same thing: "500 Server Error". Applying the Fundamental Theorem of Electronics Repair (99% of all equipment problems can be cured by cycling the power) I did just that. I cycled the 40A breaker on my garage subpanel supplying power to the unit.
Big mistake. Now the unit was completely and totally dead. Nothing on the display. No power to my car. Since it had at least charged my car normally, this was definitely a worsening trend. Fortunately it had already finished charging so it wasn't yet an urgent situation. I cycled power a few more times with no benefit. Later I noticed the screen was still slightly warm so I knew it was getting power. (Even when not in use, the Blink EVSE burns something like 15W continuously powering the computer, WiFi and display. How symbolic for a "green" technology like the electric vehicle.) I left it on to see if it would recover. When I got home tonight it was still dead. But in the dark I could see that the backlight was on, confirming that it's getting power.
Around noon I called Ecotality for support and waited 10 minutes or so for an agent who assured me that my repair would be a high priority. She promised me a return phone call, which I have yet to get. (See Followup below.)
What a surprise. Ecotality is still totally incompetent and their EVSE is still a piece of crap.
It is simply astounding how much effort (and government money) they have wasted taking something that is literally nothing more than a heavy-duty extension cord and turning it into a bloated, overdesigned, overpriced, oversized, unreliable and energy wasting monstrosity. It's simply ridiculous.
Supposedly all of this complexity was necessary to gather EV charging statistics for their DoE contract. But that very same information could be gathered with another conventional interval-type (time of use) electric utility meter just like the one SDG&E installed next to my main utility panel a few years ago. That meter would probably melt if it drew 15W to power itself. It has never failed in any way, and it certainly hasn't interrupted all power to my house. Ecotality's own software has been so chronically buggy that they'd get much better data from these standard utility meters, with no development budget at all.
But I guess it was much more important to tell the world that they exist by deploying big futuristic-looking boxes with touch screens and the company logo everywhere. Or perhaps their engineers (if they still have any) considered a simple, reliable, low-tech extension cord too small a challenge. Whatever, their incompetence is becoming a real problem. I'm beginning to fear that it will create a public perception that charging an electric car is inherently difficult, expensive and unreliable. And these kinds of initial impressions are both totally unnecessary and very difficult to shake.
My contract with them specifies that I get to keep the EVSE at the end of the term. I can't wait until then to go into my unit and disconnect the computer and touch screen that's given me so much grief (and wasted so much energy!) Maybe I'll finally have a dependable (if not more reasonably sized) way to Just. Charge. My. Car.
Followup: Friday morning (a day later) I got a call from an Ecotality technician and his assistant. They arrived a half hour later to take a look at my problem, and it was apparent they'd seen it before. A lot. In April Ecotality had pushed out a software upgrade but it didn't "take" and the data on the SD (flash memory) card had been corrupted. The computer in my EVSE had actually crashed at that time and they hadn't heard from it since! It kept working because the PIC that actually talks to the car was still enabled but when I cycled power the unit wasn't able to reboot and re-enable the PIC.
He swapped the card and my EVSE came right back up. Then we wasted the better part of a half hour trying to get it to peer with one of my WiFi base stations; it simply wouldn't do it, and it wouldn't say why.
On a hunch I turned off all but one of our four base stations; that did it. But why was a mystery. They verified operation with my car, buttoned up the unit, and left. I went back inside and turned on the rest of my base stations, came back out and looked at my unit.
Dead. Again.
They'd left only 10 minutes earlier. I clenched my teeth and cycled the breaker. The unit came back to life but then took at least 10 minutes installing a flurry of system updates. Since the controller inside runs Linux I even recognized a few. During this time it "apologized" for not being available for use.
I was so fed up with the flakiness of its WiFi that I spent the next hour running a hardwired Ethernet cable to the thing just to make those problems go away.
Sorry, but all this just doesn't cut it. There is simply no excuse for this thing not working whenever it has power. After all, as I keep saying, it's nothing more than a glorified extension cord. That's it! It would have been absolutely trivial for the software to simply lift the pin to the PIC microcontroller that enables it to work, and that would have let the EVSE supply power while the computer was doing its thing. That, and the fact that the software update had corrupted the flash memory in the first place (and had apparently done so on many other EVSEs) simply shows the carelessness or incompetence of Ecotality and its programmers. Every embedded systems programmer is (or should be) concerned about the reliability of his update procedures; they should always be designed to keep the old firmware and fall back to it if for some reason the new firmware is incompletely received, fails checksum, etc. It wasn't like the functionality of the computer was actually needed during this time (or at any other time for that matter).
Interestingly enough, when I later got on the blinknetwork web site I saw that all the usage data for the past several months was there; it hadn't been lost. That explains what I had seen inside of the unit while it was being worked on, a CX-10000-3 standalone watt-hour meter that performs the actual logging of energy use. Their Linux system simply sends the data to them. In other words, they were already doing what I had previously suggested, using a dedicated watt-hour meter to collect their usage data. That gave them even less of an excuse to not function at all times. The detailed usage data that is so precious to them is still there.
The only function provided by that firmware that is of any use to the customer at all is the ability to program the EVSE to supply power to the car at a programmed time, and to turn it on and off remotely (when it's working). I've never found that particularly useful as I'm not on a time-of-use tariff yet, and probably won't be until there are significant nighttime discounts to make it worthwhile. Besides, my car has its own delayed-charging timer, so that feature in the EVSE is largely redundant.
Even its energy usage logs aren't especially critical. It's on our regular house meter, which SDG&E replaced a while ago with an electronic unit that logs usage every 15 minutes and makes it available through their web site. It's obvious from that data when the EVSE is in use, and it always draws the same power whenever my car is charging.
I still can't wait until my contract with Ecotality is over and I can do to this thing what Dave Bowman did to Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is actually a pretty apt metaphor; Dave didn't turn off Hal completely, he just disabled Hal's higher brain functions leaving his autonomic functions intact. In the Blink EVSE I will disable (or reprogram) the Linux computer that controls the charger but leave the PIC microcontroller that actually runs the J1772 protocol with the car.
Note: I should say that the technicians who came to my house were helpful, friendly and competent. I have no gripe with them; my gripe is entirely with Ecotality the company and its bad design decisions.
(Note added in response to a comment: no, this is not a joke. The extension cord that charges my electric car really does have a web server -- only worse. Read on...)
Thinking maybe the network configuration got screwed up, last night I went to the keypad to reprogram it.
This took only the better part of an hour. Maybe the touch screen has gotten dirty, but I had a tough time getting it to see my finger. And when it did, it would usually sense it twice, very rapidly. The "buttons" seemed smaller than with the last software version, and the calibration seemed to have drifted; I had to offset my finger a little to get the right letters.
It took me a while to realize this as I had been trying to enter my rather lengthy WiFi network password, and like most computers today it blots out password echoes "for security". This ensures that I'm the only person who can't possibly see it. Have you ever tried to type your password on a malfunctioning keyboard?
A half hour later, I finally could go back inside to my web browser. Same thing: "500 Server Error". Applying the Fundamental Theorem of Electronics Repair (99% of all equipment problems can be cured by cycling the power) I did just that. I cycled the 40A breaker on my garage subpanel supplying power to the unit.
Big mistake. Now the unit was completely and totally dead. Nothing on the display. No power to my car. Since it had at least charged my car normally, this was definitely a worsening trend. Fortunately it had already finished charging so it wasn't yet an urgent situation. I cycled power a few more times with no benefit. Later I noticed the screen was still slightly warm so I knew it was getting power. (Even when not in use, the Blink EVSE burns something like 15W continuously powering the computer, WiFi and display. How symbolic for a "green" technology like the electric vehicle.) I left it on to see if it would recover. When I got home tonight it was still dead. But in the dark I could see that the backlight was on, confirming that it's getting power.
Around noon I called Ecotality for support and waited 10 minutes or so for an agent who assured me that my repair would be a high priority. She promised me a return phone call, which I have yet to get. (See Followup below.)
What a surprise. Ecotality is still totally incompetent and their EVSE is still a piece of crap.
It is simply astounding how much effort (and government money) they have wasted taking something that is literally nothing more than a heavy-duty extension cord and turning it into a bloated, overdesigned, overpriced, oversized, unreliable and energy wasting monstrosity. It's simply ridiculous.
Supposedly all of this complexity was necessary to gather EV charging statistics for their DoE contract. But that very same information could be gathered with another conventional interval-type (time of use) electric utility meter just like the one SDG&E installed next to my main utility panel a few years ago. That meter would probably melt if it drew 15W to power itself. It has never failed in any way, and it certainly hasn't interrupted all power to my house. Ecotality's own software has been so chronically buggy that they'd get much better data from these standard utility meters, with no development budget at all.
But I guess it was much more important to tell the world that they exist by deploying big futuristic-looking boxes with touch screens and the company logo everywhere. Or perhaps their engineers (if they still have any) considered a simple, reliable, low-tech extension cord too small a challenge. Whatever, their incompetence is becoming a real problem. I'm beginning to fear that it will create a public perception that charging an electric car is inherently difficult, expensive and unreliable. And these kinds of initial impressions are both totally unnecessary and very difficult to shake.
My contract with them specifies that I get to keep the EVSE at the end of the term. I can't wait until then to go into my unit and disconnect the computer and touch screen that's given me so much grief (and wasted so much energy!) Maybe I'll finally have a dependable (if not more reasonably sized) way to Just. Charge. My. Car.
Followup: Friday morning (a day later) I got a call from an Ecotality technician and his assistant. They arrived a half hour later to take a look at my problem, and it was apparent they'd seen it before. A lot. In April Ecotality had pushed out a software upgrade but it didn't "take" and the data on the SD (flash memory) card had been corrupted. The computer in my EVSE had actually crashed at that time and they hadn't heard from it since! It kept working because the PIC that actually talks to the car was still enabled but when I cycled power the unit wasn't able to reboot and re-enable the PIC.
He swapped the card and my EVSE came right back up. Then we wasted the better part of a half hour trying to get it to peer with one of my WiFi base stations; it simply wouldn't do it, and it wouldn't say why.
On a hunch I turned off all but one of our four base stations; that did it. But why was a mystery. They verified operation with my car, buttoned up the unit, and left. I went back inside and turned on the rest of my base stations, came back out and looked at my unit.
Dead. Again.
They'd left only 10 minutes earlier. I clenched my teeth and cycled the breaker. The unit came back to life but then took at least 10 minutes installing a flurry of system updates. Since the controller inside runs Linux I even recognized a few. During this time it "apologized" for not being available for use.
I was so fed up with the flakiness of its WiFi that I spent the next hour running a hardwired Ethernet cable to the thing just to make those problems go away.
Sorry, but all this just doesn't cut it. There is simply no excuse for this thing not working whenever it has power. After all, as I keep saying, it's nothing more than a glorified extension cord. That's it! It would have been absolutely trivial for the software to simply lift the pin to the PIC microcontroller that enables it to work, and that would have let the EVSE supply power while the computer was doing its thing. That, and the fact that the software update had corrupted the flash memory in the first place (and had apparently done so on many other EVSEs) simply shows the carelessness or incompetence of Ecotality and its programmers. Every embedded systems programmer is (or should be) concerned about the reliability of his update procedures; they should always be designed to keep the old firmware and fall back to it if for some reason the new firmware is incompletely received, fails checksum, etc. It wasn't like the functionality of the computer was actually needed during this time (or at any other time for that matter).
Interestingly enough, when I later got on the blinknetwork web site I saw that all the usage data for the past several months was there; it hadn't been lost. That explains what I had seen inside of the unit while it was being worked on, a CX-10000-3 standalone watt-hour meter that performs the actual logging of energy use. Their Linux system simply sends the data to them. In other words, they were already doing what I had previously suggested, using a dedicated watt-hour meter to collect their usage data. That gave them even less of an excuse to not function at all times. The detailed usage data that is so precious to them is still there.
The only function provided by that firmware that is of any use to the customer at all is the ability to program the EVSE to supply power to the car at a programmed time, and to turn it on and off remotely (when it's working). I've never found that particularly useful as I'm not on a time-of-use tariff yet, and probably won't be until there are significant nighttime discounts to make it worthwhile. Besides, my car has its own delayed-charging timer, so that feature in the EVSE is largely redundant.
Even its energy usage logs aren't especially critical. It's on our regular house meter, which SDG&E replaced a while ago with an electronic unit that logs usage every 15 minutes and makes it available through their web site. It's obvious from that data when the EVSE is in use, and it always draws the same power whenever my car is charging.
I still can't wait until my contract with Ecotality is over and I can do to this thing what Dave Bowman did to Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is actually a pretty apt metaphor; Dave didn't turn off Hal completely, he just disabled Hal's higher brain functions leaving his autonomic functions intact. In the Blink EVSE I will disable (or reprogram) the Linux computer that controls the charger but leave the PIC microcontroller that actually runs the J1772 protocol with the car.
Note: I should say that the technicians who came to my house were helpful, friendly and competent. I have no gripe with them; my gripe is entirely with Ecotality the company and its bad design decisions.