Adding a charging clock to the Siemens Versicharge

Is there any interest in a DIY project to add a time-of-use timer system to the Siemens Versicharge? It's something that could fairly easily be done without any permanent or serious modifications to the charger. Here's some background:

There is a terminal block inside the Versicharge that's intended to allow remote control of charging availability. When this signal is engaged, the "remote" light on the front panel will light up and charging will not occur.

If you were to connect this signal up to a clock, then you could easily have your car charge when the rates are low (if that's something that affects you).

I'm fairly confident that a small Arduino-based system could be devised to do exactly that, and the result would be something that would be easy to build, cheap and perfectly effective. I don't mind doing it, but I don't want to bother if nobody would want one.

It would be cool if this project could be setup to work with EVSEs that don't have a timer input as well. Seems like you could insert a small relay into the pilot signal wire and make a generic timer board.

I had an open collector output in mind. It would be trivial to make that into a relay closure, in general. If you disconnect the pilot and reconnect it later, that would certainly work as a general solution.

nsayer said:

Is there any interest in a DIY project to add a time-of-use timer system to the Siemens Versicharge? It's something that could fairly easily be done without any permanent or serious modifications to the charger. Here's some background:

Click to expand...

We just bought a Versicharge and was looking to see whether anybody had made use of the remote features with a DIY solution. Did you?

If I read the docs right, the two connections are just contact closure, not signalling of any kind: one says "if these contacts are closed, the unit is remote-controlled; don't charge". The other says "if these contacts are closed, the unit IS charging". Nothing more informative?

I did get it to work. An open collector is sufficient to stop and start charging. I didn't really pursue it much for a couple reasons. Firstly, I don't have ToU electricity where we live, so I don't actually need the functionality. Secondly, it wasn't much after that that I wound up designing and building my own double-headed EVSE called the J1772 Hydra. It has an RTC and a 4 event, 7 day timer system built into the firmware... which I still don't need.

This little puppy looks like it would fit the bill. Small, programmable and cheap. Should be able to use it to interrupt the pilot signal on units that don't have a control input.


http://www.amazon.com/uxcell-Digital-Power-Programmable-Switch/dp/B008999RYY