Cloud ecosystem development for EV charging stations

The brief

MyBox is an enterprise manufacturer and supplier of EV charging stations from Eastern Europe. The company needed backend cloud infrastructure for operators and support teams, with mobile applications for end-users.

Challenge

The most critical business challenge was developing a universal cloud ecosystem to remotely connect, configure, and support thousands of EV chargers with different hardware and user flows.

The second part of the challenge was ensuring enterprise-grade security while keeping everything user-friendly on both sides of the vendor and the end-users

Solution

We re-use the functionality of the 2Smart Cloud platform as a framework and developed a set of custom features on top of it.

Reused platform features:

• MQTT Broker for managing devices.
• Collecting of time series data.
• Monitoring of connected device statuses.
• Statistics gathering for connected devices and online users.
• Versioning of the firmware.
• OTA updates support.
• Health monitoring of the platform itself.
• Integrations with Google Home, iOS shortcuts, messengers, and phone call control.
• Encrypted backups.
• Push notifications in mobile apps and service notifications in cloud app.

Custom developed features:

• Developed a web admin panel that allows custom visualizations of telemetry, different levels of remote control, debugging, and configuration capabilities over connected charging stations, using our custom UI library.
• Added flexible permission management.
• Implemented additional authentications for matching enterprise security demands.
• Developed single super-versatile firmware to ensure easy interconnection between different hardware.
• Provided iOS and Android white-labeled mobile applications based on the 2Smart Cloud app.

Key features

Implementation of features in the development of a cloud-based ecosystem in Stage One:

• White-labeled mobile applications for EV charging stations.
• Cloud web panel for remote administration of thousands of EV chargers, with flexible multi-layer permissions management.
• Remote updates and configuration functionality to ensure remote support.
• Remote telemetry gathering.
• Ensured future scalability with the help of universal firmware that handles hardware from different vendors.

Features to be implemented in Stage Two:

• Generating custom reports for admins and consumers.
• Implementing a billing gateway for the public usage of the chargers.
• Developing the user flow for unregistered users to use public chargers without hassle.
• Developing custom mobile app widgets for in-depth configuration of connected devices.
• Developing a custom integration for third-party charging stations for connecting them to the system without refining the firmware of each charger.
• Implementing an OCPP technology for connecting third-party devices into the managing system for the EV Chargers.

Results

• Developed an enterprise-grade cloud management system for EV Chargers that remotely manages and supports a network of thousands of private and public EV Chargers from different vendors.
• Successfully reused a big part of the platform`s functionality to cut the time to market drastically.
• On top of the existing functionality, we developed features such as advanced user permission management, custom data visualizations, and additional security measures.
• In addition, we developed a custom, super-flexible firmware for the ESP-C3 MCU controlling the chargers that ensures easy future support and scaling.
• Provided modern and comprehensive white-labeled mobile applications for the end-users.