Support

Hi,

At some expense, I bought one of these in the UK, and I'm now starting to wonder if I've made a terrible mistake.

I bought a Wifi version, and was "pleasanly" surprised to receive a TFT version.

This positive "upgrade" has started to look like a curse.

These forums seem to be close to dead, and the official documentation is ... Where? There's this forum, and a "Knowledge base", but where is the documentation?

OK, fine. It seemed to work, so being busy, I forgot about it for a while. It charged the car.

But my partner's one (bought on my recommendation, I might add - thanks for the egg on my face) was stuck reporting the wrong power, and I couldn't seem to change the settings for the supply voltage. It, too, had the firmware that refused to update itself.

Some research led me to believe that the layout of the flash o nthe ESP32 was causing the inability to update, so I have updated both of our EVSEs by plugging them into a serial interface - another process which is exceptionally poorly documented.

After much ado, I finally got both units updated (one of my serial leads was bad, not the fault of openEVSE, but it would have been very useful if there was literally ANY documentation to confirm I was performing the correct steps).

Now, both EVSEs show the right power, but mine has become horrifically unreliable. My partners car (we dont live together) has a bigger battery, so they have performed fewer charges since the upgrade. Theirs may have the same issue, I just don't know yet.

Weirdly, despite applying the exact same update, my EVSE's "lightshow" (which is extremely annoying by the way, how do I get rid of it and return to the old "fixed colours"? I dislike drawing attention to my home, I don't live in a great neighbourhood), is considerably faster than theirs.

But the main problem is that:

1) My EVSE will cycle on and off every few seconds when initiating a charge, and has to be power cycled to prevent it doing this - this cannot be good for either it or my poor car

2) My EVSE *still* does not appear to be able to update itself via the internet. Why? It just gets stuck on the update screen forever.

Things that would help tremendously would include:

1) Proper documentation, of all functions, and of all update procedures. Far too many features have completely useless "help" buttons that tell you nothing of use

2) Some method for the EVSE to report wether it is online - I have no way of knowing if it can access the internet, unless I'm expected to packet-sniff its wifi link? This is unacceptable. Diagnostics begins with solid debugging information

3) The Update process NEEDS a progress indication of some sort.

My current versions (as much as I can trust them, since I don't trust the device at all right now) are:

EVSE: 8.2.2

OpenEVSE Wifi v5.1.5

I used the files from here:

Specifically:

partitions_16mb.bin

bootloader_16mb.bin

openevse_wifi_tft_v1.bin

These were flashed with:

esptool --baud 921600 --before default_reset --after hard_reset write_flash -z --flash_mode dio --flash_size=detect 0x1000 bootloader_16mb.bin 0x8000 partitions_16mb.bin 0x10000 openevse_wifi_tft_v1.bin

No errors were reported by the flash tool and the unit booted first time after flashing, the firmware was clearly the new firmware, not the old version (it had a radically different display)