2024
Additional charging statuses
In the dashboard, the Chargers page now displays additional statuses when chargers are in use to allow for more granular visibility and to confirm vehicles are actively drawing power. The additional charging statuses correspond to the transaction OCPP statuses reported by the charger and include:- Preparing: Either the vehicle is plugged in but a session has not been started via the driver app, or vice versa.
- Charging: The charging session is currently in-progress.
- Finishing: The charging session is complete, but the vehicle is not yet unplugged.
- Paused by vehicle: The charging session has been paused by the vehicle, due to the vehicle battery reaching its limit or having a charging schedule enabled.
- Paused by charger: Charging has been paused by the charger (charger OCPP messages typically containing additional reasons why).
When chargers are in use, the transaction status is displayed along with a tooltip giving a brief description of the status meaning as well as amount of time since the charger last reported the OCPP status. The list of chargers on the Chargers page can be filtered by these transaction statuses. In addition, the overall summary status for active charging sessions has been updated from “Charging” to “In use” throughout the dashboard experience.
Bank information in dashboard
There are new alerts in the dashboard to prompt site hosts to provide bank account information when they have paid pricing enabled.- Company page: Bank info status is displayed with a link to the web submission form.
- Pop-up prompt: Users will be prompted upon logging into the dashboard if the company is missing bank information.
- Email reminders: For site hosts who have funds pending deposit, but are missing bank info, email reminders will be sent informing users they can provide their bank account details to receive their deposits.
Additional: Dashboard data will automatically refresh for certain elements (session info/data, statuses, charts/visualizations), without requiring a browser page refresh. Data refreshes periodically every 15, 30 or 60 seconds depending on the interface component. Time zones are automatically selected when adding new locations in the dashboard. After setting a location latitude and longitude, the closest time zone (including specific area + location, e.g. “America-New York”) will be selected. It can be manually edited if needed. The driver web app “stop button” for chargers with idle fees has been updated to specifically represent scenarios where transactions must be stopped to allow drivers to unplug their vehicles (a requirement for certain vehicle + charger models).
The new Reports experience in the dashboard allows site hosts and partners to generate and download reports for their chargers and historical usage.
- Charger statistics: Provides monthly aggregations of charger information such as # of sessions, # of unique customers, total charging time, total energy provided, and revenue.
- Full session: Provides information such as session duration, energy used, idle duration, peak power, average power and revenue.
- 15-minute intervals: Splits session information into 15-minute intervals and provides information such as start time and end time, average power, total energy consumed, peak power and idle duration.
Note: Historical 15-minute interval data will begin accruing upon release, with data from Jan 22nd, 2024 and beyond being accessible at this time. The initial release for reports will not include historical data for deleted chargers. There will be a follow up iteration soon after which will include the ability to generate data for deleted chargers.
Download OCPP messages
OCPP messages can now be downloaded as a .csv file for a given charger over a specified time period to allow for sharing OCPP message data. Additional: Improved dashboard responsiveness and device scalability with scalable card components. Enhanced the multi-company invite user experience flow and email design. Bug fixes: Update charger page information when switching between companies. Fix ability to select the start date when using the custom date range selector.
2023
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Power management in the dashboard: Power management is accessed via the “Power” tab on the navigation sidebar of the dashboard.
The power management dashboard experience is designed for three use cases:
Demoing of power management system through a visual interface that empowers sales teams to effectively demo and showcase the system’s capabilities.
Visual feedback so that installers can receive confirmation of successful deployments with accurate power management rules for a location, giving confidence during and after installation.
Insight into live power allocation when troubleshooting chargers to view power allocation for individual chargers and power management groups at any point in time. The electrical infrastructure is represented, including all main panels and any sub-panels for a circuit with chargers with their names/labels, breaker ratings, and maximum continuous load.
Charger phase wiring
Other power-consuming devices sharing a circuit with chargers (referred to as “unmanaged loads” in the dashboard)
Edit OCPP ID: A charger’s OCPP ID must be set the same in ChargeLab's system as the charger’s configuration in order for it to connect. If a mismatch exists, chargers will not connect to ChargeLab’s system. To help with troubleshooting charger connection issues, the OCPP ID as set in ChargeLab’s system can now be edited in the dashboard.
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Move chargers between companies: Chargers sometimes need to be moved from one company to another. This can happen when charger ownership transfers between companies (e.g., a new property management company), a single company is split into multiple companies for various reasons, or a charger otherwise needs to be moved to another company. Now, you can move chargers via the actions menu of the charger details card on the Charger page.
When a charger is moved to another company, historical charging session data is retained by the company that previously owned the moved charger. Historical sessions will appear in the dashboard (e.g., Overview page, payout reports, etc.) for the prior company.
Failed session emails for expired credit cards: Drivers receive email notifications when attempts to start a charging session fail due to the user having an expired credit card with guidance for how they can update their payment method and start charging.
Additional:
- When adding chargers in the dashboard, there is now an optional checkbox to use the charger’s serial number as the OCPP ID.
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Charger page in the driver web-app: The charger page of the driver web app has a refreshed look to achieve several goals:
Improve the clarity and usability of the core charging experience
Bring attention to the most important information (e.g., pricing and description)
Align the charging experience with the design system used throughout the rest of the user experience
Dashboard display for smaller screen sizes: In order to support smaller screen sizes including laptops and mobile tablets, the dashboard has improved adaptability in its display.
Delete chargers: Chargers sometimes need to be removed (deleted) from a company. This can happen when swapping/replacing new chargers for faulty units, or even to start over the deployment process freshly for various troubleshooting purposes.
Additional:
- When starting a charging session on power managed chargers, the initial power allocation will now be the maximum of the available capacity. This will provide a faster charging experience for drivers.
UI cleanup for the OCPP messages feature.
Improved RFID card linking experience to support select card formats other than ChargeLab-provided cards. Note that this update applies to the dashboard and web app; the mobile app in an upcoming update.
Increased resolution of QR code images exported from the Charger page in the dashboard.
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Blue-Green deployments: This release is a system update that does not include feature changes or bug fixes, but does provide significant benefits: zero downtime during releases and significant improvements for developer efficiency.
- Zero downtime. During production releases, chargers will no longer briefly disconnect from the CSMS and user applications (driver web/mobile app, dashboard) will be fully available.
- Faster troubleshooting. Addressing bugs or production issues becomes significantly easier and faster. If a rollback is needed, user traffic can quickly be diverted to an alternative production stack.
- Gradual rollouts. User traffic can be gradually transferred from previous versions of apps or microservices during new releases, which allows us to test feature changes with a small population of users before expanding more broadly, ultimately further increasing overall reliability.
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Bug fixes: Various bug fixes have been implemented in this release to address issues reported by customers and observed by our support and operations teams. These include but are not limited to:
- Fixes to the email verification process which previously prevented some drivers from registering or resetting their passwords.
- Improved reliability for the database used by the dashboard, ensuring data consistency across all customer-facing interfaces.
UI/UX improvements: Enhancements in both the dashboard and driver web-app UI/UX include more intuitive navigation menus, cleaner layout designs, and improved response times for UI elements.