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s-forsberg avatar image
s-forsberg asked

Bug report: Victron EV charger unreachable at times

Hello,

I have been using the Victron EV Charging station for two months now and it is installed close to an Wifi Access point. My problem is, that the unit becomes unresponsive over the network at times and the solution is to reboot it. Now for example, the dashboard looks like this in my browser. It never finishes loading the page. When the problem occurs it is sometimes possible to ping the unit.

Installed fw is 1.23.

1664816787909.png

On my Gx device screen the following is shown, where it says that the EV charger is not currently connected:

1664817131268.png

I hope that this is resolved in the coming firmware, something is making the unit really sluggish!


//Sven F

ev charging stationbug report
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s-forsberg avatar image
s-forsberg answered ·

Good news! I turned off continuous wifi scan (see below) and the problem has not appeared since. The wifi scan obviously causes communication issues.

1674122047539.png


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s-forsberg avatar image
s-forsberg answered ·

Update: If I toggle between manual mode and automatic mode on the EVC screen and plug/unplug the car, the web connection comes to life again. I should also add that the device is also unreachable over TCP-Modbus when the previously described problem appears.

@Guy Stewart (Victron Community Manager) - I am the only one having these issues and is there any chance one of the developers can have a look at this?

Regards,
Sven

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Javier Pardo avatar image Javier Pardo commented ·

Having the same problems as you.


My post about this: https://community.victronenergy.com/questions/164206/problem-with-ev-charging-station-controls-in-vrm.html

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Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) avatar image
Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) answered ·

Hi, please send me the vrm portal ID by email, so I can have a look.

lpopescu@victronenergy.com

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Javier Pardo avatar image Javier Pardo commented ·

Having the same problems with my installation.


@Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) I've sent you my installation ID in case you want to look at it too.

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nuxland avatar image
nuxland answered ·

I do not have EV car yet so nothing is connected to the charger. But about a week or so charger is not accessible anymore. In Cerbo there is option to remove disconnected devices.

1667065702034.png

and in VRM portal it shows like this.

1667065607819.png


After flipping power contactor it will start to work again.

It is also not pinging and i'm not able to open webbrower to EV Charger.


PS! wifi signal is strong so it's something else.


1667065607819.png (18.7 KiB)
1667065702034.png (34.6 KiB)
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Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) avatar image
Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) answered ·

Hi, can you email me the vrm portal ID?

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nuxland avatar image
nuxland answered ·

Today morning EV Charger was connected again.
I figured out that my Asus router is making every sunday night at 4AM restart.

I have also a asys AiMesh in use with 4 extra AP-s. And EV Charger is actually connected to one of AP-s.

But I also have a lot of wifi cameras Dahua and Hkvision one's and they work very good.

So there must be something with wifi inside EV Charger that it got itself disconnected or so.

-56dB is signal strength.

Will monitore and next time I find it disconnected try to initialize reconnet withing asus router.

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lucca371 avatar image
lucca371 answered ·

Sometimes i have the same problem in the remote console. In device list the charger is not connected, also in VRM. Sometimes it helps to restart the ev charger.

In some cases the display of the charger shows no (or the same) values from the grid and gx device. Then auto mode doesnt working. I can fix this with a restart of the gx device. I don't need to restart the charger in this case. Charger and GX are connected over WLAN at the same AP in 1m distance. I have also used another router. But no change.

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s-forsberg avatar image
s-forsberg answered ·

No solution yet. And it works really bad. If I hadn't been an Electrical Engineer I would have lost my patience long time ago and returned the product!
See my graphs below that highlights the issue. Can you please have a look at this @Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ?


1. Plotting a modbus parameter from the charger in Home Assistant shows gaps in the data where the unit is unresponsive. This is the ONLY modbus device I have that does that!
1672241652731.png


2. Plotting ping latency in Pingplotter to the unit shows red areas of 100% packet loss. One-minute intervals are clearly visible.

1672241818451.png


1672241652731.png (27.3 KiB)
1672241818451.png (48.0 KiB)
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Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) avatar image Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ commented ·
Might be an incompatibility issue, can you try with a different wifi router? Or test for a few hours with your phone in hotspot mode? Please share the results, it shouldn't be like that.
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s-forsberg avatar image s-forsberg Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ commented ·

Have not got time for this, sorry! You need to investigate this. I would advice the dev team to try with an Asus Access Point. This is a popular brand.

I don't know if this link would be of any help?
https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino/issues/2795


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Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) avatar image Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ s-forsberg commented ·
There are thousands of WiFi routers and access points on the market, we can't test them all. But based on what you are saying, we can remember this one as probably incompatible.
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s-forsberg avatar image s-forsberg Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ commented ·
Yes there are. That is why my suggestion is that you try with the 10 most popular brands, where one on them is Asus. The EV charger is pretty useless for me at this point.
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nuxland avatar image
nuxland answered ·

My case resolved when I installed a separate WiFi AP with different SSID to my network and connected EV charger to that. And now it is alive and responsive over a month already.

But it is strange that all other wifi devices (I have multiple cameras and etc) work just fine with ASUS AiMesh system.

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s-forsberg avatar image s-forsberg commented ·
@nuxland What AP brand did you change to?
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nuxland avatar image nuxland s-forsberg commented ·

I hade one spare tp-link TL-WA801ND and it worked. So it is in the same LAN but separated from ASUS AiMesh SSID-s and also in different frequency. only 2,4Mhz also (11g only also)

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s-forsberg answered ·
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Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) avatar image Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ commented ·
Hi, There is no issue with Mikrotik, one of our testing locations is covered only with those. And our microcontroller is esp32, not 8266. On another location we have an Asus AP but not in a mesh configuration. So it's not an issue with Asus brand. Please tell me what is the model used, maybe we can order one and have a look.


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s-forsberg avatar image s-forsberg Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ commented ·

Hi,

The router is Asus RT-AC66U (not mesh). Would appreciate if you could try it! Or at least find a recommended setting for it. I should also mention that the charger has a static ip and that I am using Home Assistant to read and write to it over Modbus-TCP with a scan interval of 10s.

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s-forsberg avatar image
s-forsberg answered ·

I have made new ping tests, this time with another ESP32 device on the same network. It looks OK:

1673719605134.png


And the EV Charger again:

1673720341747.png

Bottom line is that this can't possibly be blamed on the access point.

How can we proceed @Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ?


1673719605134.png (36.5 KiB)
1673720341747.png (83.6 KiB)
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Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) avatar image Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ commented ·
Hi, I think the same AP was ordered, so you'll have to wait. We have already sold few thousands units, and as you can see here on the community, no similar complaints. If you have some time, as I said above, perform the same test with a different AP, and/or with your phone in AP mode. Looking at the report above, you need only a few hours of testing to have a conclusion.
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s-forsberg avatar image
s-forsberg answered ·

@Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) I have news! The unit was unresponsive as usual and then I tried a random thing: I tried to logon to the unit over SSH. Just a pointless random test, right?

Anyway, let's look at the results. The SSH logon attempt does "something" (maybe disabling low power mode) and voilà! Now the unit becomes really responsive for a while.

1674057054997.png


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Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) avatar image
Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) answered ·

Hi, what you are seeing in there is actually the system searching for another AP with better signal. While doing this, there are some ping issues, of course. That feature can be disabled, but it shouldn't affect you in any way. There is no low power mode.


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Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) avatar image Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ commented ·

Do you have multiple AP's having the same SSID?, if yes, the charging station is maybe jumping from one AP to the other, and during this “jump” it's not answering to ping requests.


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s-forsberg avatar image s-forsberg Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ commented ·

Hi,

I have only one access point with that name. How can I disable the scan?

I tried a forced scan and the behaviour from the left side of my graph came back! It seems that this behaviour lasts resulting in an unusable interface, even when the scan is finished.

Regarding my graph, Why do you think the ping times suddenly dropped when I tried SSH?


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Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) avatar image
Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) answered ·

Send me private message with the VRM portal ID

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jasonsparky avatar image
jasonsparky answered ·

I have had the same issue for some time now. No WiFi signal for over a week, and I cannot reset the unit (only power on and off), so it's impossible to resolve.

Bluetooth doesn't work either, I can see the device but it won't connect. Doesn't appear in VictronConnect. I cannot use it at all since it thinks the SOC is zero and won't work in manual mode. (FW version 1.23) Very frustrating.

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Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) avatar image Lucian Popescu (Victron Energy Staff) ♦♦ commented ·
Hi, I'm not sure that I understand what the problem is, can you please explain?

Why you can reset it?
To use it with Victron Connect, you need to update it to 1.24, version 1.23 does not offer Victron Connect functionality.

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