One of the drawbacks of being an early adopter is that you might end up investing in equipment that becomes obsolete rather quickly. Although it’s clear that electric vehicles are here to stay, those who bought a charging station for their EV a few years ago may find it slow and incompatible with modern cars or billing networks, necessitating an upgrade to one of the latest models.
If you don’t mind tinkering, these older chargers can provide an excellent base to construct your own state-of-the-art charging station, as [James] over at Diary-of-a-Geek did. He bought a Chargepoint CT2000 series charger and installed a brand-new charging unit inside based on OpenEVSE components. The CT2000 is an older model that’s no longer manufactured, and although it can still connect to Chargepoint’s network, a subscription renewal would cost several thousand dollars. [James] was not willing to make that investment for a unit that he was going to install at home anyway, so he decided to buy replacement parts from OpenEVSE, a supplier of open-source EV charging stations and components.
The OpenEVSE charging controller sitting on the ChargePoint bracket
The insides of a charging station are actually pretty simple, since the real battery charger is inside the car: the station just contains a beefy contactor to switch the AC current on or off, along with some circuitry to measure the current flowing and an interface to connect to a payment network of some sort. The first step therefore was to hook up the contactor and current transformer to the OpenEVSE controller. This was easy since the new part was way smaller than the orig ..
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