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Configuration of an Alfen ICU Charging Station

Niklas Wallner
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The activation of the charging station with the be.ENERGISED backend is only possible after successful configuration of the charging station. This article describes how to connect your Alfen ICU charging station.

Before you start the configuration, make sure that you have an active SIM card in your charging station. If you want to offer the direct payment service, you can order a QR Code sticker from our ChargePoint be.ENERGISED support.

If you have ordered a Monitoring Bundle Package, please make sure that the following materials are included with the be.ENERGISED COMMUNITY Onboarding Package

  • SIM card
  • QR Code sticker (with printed charging point ID)
  • Charging card in be.ENERGISED COMMUNITY design (RFID card)

 

Note: For a "public" connection (see also OCPP Endpoints), a TLS certificate must be uploaded for stations that have a firmware version below 4.15.0 installed. This certificate is automatically installed at the station as part of a firmware update (Vers. 4.15.0 or higher). For more information about updating the firmware on your Alfen ICU station, please refer to this official description from Alfen. 

Port "443" must be used for all public and secure variants.

 

Configuration via Alfen Service Installer Setup

Alfen offers its own software (https://alfen.com/en/downloads) for the configuration parameters, which allows a comfortable administration of the charging station. To access the configuration of the charging station, please install the appropriate software on your device and connect to the charging station. Under the menu item Connectivity you will find the settings for the connection. 

Please note that this article only refers to SIM cards provided by ChargePoint. If you use a SIM card from an alternative provider you will need to use their APN information and the OCPP endpoints may also have to be adapted.

Please refer to your user manual for which OCPP configuration you need. A connection via SOAP is currently only supported via the OCPP Broker. In the long term, however, SOAP will be completely eliminated. Here, we describe how to set the values to be connected via web socket (JSON):

 

General

Go to the menu item General under Connectivity and select as follows

  • Back office preset: choose <Manually enter backend settings>
  • Connect method: GPRS
  • Protocol: choose the desired version OCPP 1.5 or 1.6

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GPRS

Furthermore, please select the menu item GPRS under Connectivity and fill in the fields as shown below:

 

When connecting via a Broker URL, it can happen that the URL is too long. In this case, you can split it between Back office URL and Back office path.

For example, for the following URL: ws://INSTANCE.public.ocpp-broker.com/ocpp/cp/socket/16/CHARGE_POINT_ID, it can be split as follows.

Back office URL: ws://INSTANCE.public.ocpp-broker.com:PORT/

Back office path: ocpp/cp/socket/16/CHARGE_POINT_ID

 

*PORT: Enter either "80" for private or "443" for public connection variants.

 

 

INSTANCE
You can easily find out your instance (account) name in the link to the backend. Access to the backend: https://example.beenergised.cloud/. Here you can read out the instance by taking the value AFTER "https://" and BEFORE ".beenergised.cloud/". In this example the INSTANCE is called "example".

mceclip1.png

 

CHARGE_POINT ID
You replace the CHARGE_POINT_ID with a unique station name. This means that this name (or ID) may only be assigned once among all your stations.

Please note that the chargepoint identity must not contain spaces, special characters (e.g.: +*!#) and letters not known in English (e.g.: ä, ö, ü, ß). The exception is the underline character (_), which can be used.

Furthermore, the chargepoint identity must not exceed a maximum length of 45 characters. 

 

The correct APN access data may be found in the following article. 

002.png

 

Case study

We connect a station with the CHARGE_POINT_ID "beispielsstation1" to the instance ws://beispiel.beenergised.cloud:9016 (Standard OCPP 1.6) with a Wherever-SIM-card. The APN data can be found here.

Fields to be completed:

  • Back office URL
  • Back office path
  • APN name

Please refer to this article for the corresponding APN access data (Network GSM).

 

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Version: 2023-05-23 12:20:15 UTC

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