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Building my own EVSE

While I’m waiting for my Tesla Model S I also bought a new house. In December 6th 2011 I received the keys and ever since I’ve been working on the electrical infrastructure to prepare everything for the 3-phase charging station (EVSE) which should go into the garage.

I modified my fistribution panel to have a dedicated 3x32A connection to my garage where I can install my EVSE. The purpose is not only to charge the future Model S, but also the Roadster of my colleague and other EV’s which might visit me.

But then, which EVSE do you buy? I’ve been looking around and a EVSE capable of 3x32A costs about EUR 2000,00! It’s nothing more then a CFGI, a fuse and a controller, so I figured that could be done for less.

After some searching I found the Open EVSE project. I was sold right away! What’s cooler then building your own EVSE with Open Source software!?

I ordered the Open EVSE kit with the Advanced Power Supply and got it last week. Right now I’m waiting for my 63A relais (I like it beefy) and some other components like the Type 2 socket for in the outer-wall of my garage.

The Model S won’t fit in the garage, so I’m going to install the Type 2 socket in the outer-wall of the garage. All the EVSE components can be inside, that will make it very clean. Just a Type 2 socket where you plug in your EV and it starts charging! Couldn’t be easier.

To my garage I’m running a 5G6 cable. That’s five wires of 6mm² each. This cable will be capable of doing 3x32A which should recharge the 85kWh battery in a little bit over 4 hours.

My main fuses are 40A, so when I’m charging with 3x32A I can’t turn on my oven or use my electrical cooking. Open EVSE however supports dynamically changing the current.

In my distribution panel I have a kWh meter with a M-Bus exit over which I can read out the current going through my main fuses. I’ve made a nice web page where I display this information, but the main goal is to have the EVSE read out this data and adjust the current based on what other appliances in my house are using.

This way I’ll never blow my main fuses and I’ll still be able to use 32A at the EVSE when available. Something like my little smart grid!

As I’m still waiting for a couple of components I’m not going to post anything yet about which I’m using. I promise, I’ll add a Wiki on the Open EVSE page about how I build my 3-phase EVSE with Open EVSE!

That’s it for now, keep tuned for more information!

Now it’s back to waiting… Not only for the components, but also for the Model S!

Magento one page checkout keeps redirecting back to the shopping cart

A few friends of mine run a Magento webshop (1.3) and they had the problem that customers would be redirected back to the shopping cart after filling in their personal information.

I tried the same, but my order would go through. I was kind of lost, why did it always work for me but it wouldn’t for other customers?

After some hours of searching I tried to enter my Gmail address instead of my personal address and that failed. I got redirected back as well.

A report showed up in var/report with a warning from the Zend Framework core saying that the gmail address could not be validated.

Some Googling brought me to the magento forums.

The bug is indeed in lib/Zend/Validate/Hostname.php on line 329

Replace:

if (Zend_Loader::isReadable($classFile)) {

With:

if (file_exists($classFile) && Zend_Loader::isReadable($classFile)) {

And you should be up and running again!

I haven’t debugged this further to find out what the root cause is, but I’d thought I’d share my solution.

My first post

This is just another personal blog on the big, big, big internet! I work as CTO at PCextreme B.V. and i will be posting a lot about my daily work.

Just like any other system administrator i run into problems i have to fix or some really undocumented software. Just like all other sysadmins i get a lot of information from various blogposts, so i thought, why not help other people by posting my information?

I’ll try to post as much as i can in english, but sometimes when the post is for dutch people only, i’ll make a post in dutch.

But most of my posts will be about Ubuntu Linux, KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine), iSCSI, DRBD, Apache, etc, etc. I’ll not try to post any information that can be found in a howto or documentation.

I hope i’ll be able to help some sysadmins in trouble!