Designing a better portable EV charger (granny charger)
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- Опубликовано: 30 сен 2024
- Today we're improving on the stock Nissan Portable EVSE, also known as granny charger. The stock EVSE is about 7lbs (3.5kg) and charges at 230V/10A (about 2.3kW). My new design is just under 1kg and charges at 230V/16A (about 3.6kW) - and it fits in the glovebox! It may not seem like a huge deal, but it's a great upgrade for me and I love how it turned out.
Where to find this board
And can you upgrade it to 32A
place share used parts list (name, model, price, whre ?). thank you
This is very impressive. The breakdown of the charging protocol explains why these are not to be scared of.
I’m looking for a 6kw capable wifi controlled evse that can be integrated with my solar to use my excess solar and programmed to use cheap
Off peak power.
Excuse me
A drawing or picture showing the wire connection to the dc CHAdeMO socket
Can you share schematic?
I am buying a Zero SR/F motorcycle which comes with a Mennekes type 2 plug, more brands and models are now coming on the market using the same plug. Unfortunately the current offering regarding charging cables and EVSE are only designed for cars. To be used with a motorcycle they are way too heavy and the cables much too long. Regarding an EVSE what you have done is just perfect, exactly what is needed. I would be willing to pay extra for the very valuable convenience of a small and light package. If this ever comes in production I would love hearing about it, let's hope some entrepreneurial AliExpress retailer will view your video and see my comment 😊.
I think the connector is that big to act as a robust handle/grip and strain relief.
This is the best instruction i have seen...is it possible to contact you? Could you be more specific on what electronics exactly did you buy and where to assemble all into the ali supplied J connector please?
If you mass produce it, your costs will be way less than the 100 euro you paid now. But it all depends how many you would like to produce.
Sure, at 100+ units it could be more interesting price-wise, but I'd have to be damn sure there are that many people willing to buy it. J1772 is a dying breed, I can't just make a bunch and expect to sell them off in the future. This is very much aimed at older type EVs.
@@PowerElectronicsBlog Why it the J1772 dying? It's pretty much standard for L2 chargers in my experience.
@@PowerElectronicsBlog in euro countrys type 1 is rare indeed, I would buy a type 2 tho becaise it would safe space in my smart fortwo ed
I keep considering making a type 2 version of this.
Splendid video. Glad to read in the comments that you mopped up the last compliance requirements for the electronics. A very neat solution.
You sound like Elon Musk (the crazy one!)
Are you Implimenting the diode test?
21:40
the best EV is a cordless EV :)) lol
Congrats on your ingenuity. Great job.
I''m in the USA and found an auto sensing dual voltage charger (110vac, 10a & 220vac, 16a) to use in my car when I'm away from home. I got a couple adapters and can plug into a variety of wall plugs.
That replaces my Nissan 110vac charger. The box is a little bigger but manageable.
When at home I have a 220vac wall mount charger.
Dude is way too humble
is it possible to make a mennekes type 2 plug?
I looking into chargin my car on the go with a solar generator that can charge the ev battery when im not driving it.
my smart fortwo 2014 (17.6kw) with a eco flow delta in the back or in a shed with solar on it to charge my car be it from the trunk or shed.
can the mercedes granny charger do that?
granny charging usually means SLOW - so max 2-4kW - its all depend of RELAYs - for 1phase 10-16A you have small relay - for 3phase you have to buy bigger + and 3 of them
How much faster was your charge time ? Great project...!
The standard charge power of Nissan Leaf.
I wonder why that plug is so expensive: it's just plastic with a few metal pieces!
Hello
i am hosam from Jordan
i like this charger improvement
how can i get the controller board???
I can ship you one for a SMALL fee lol
Great project! You've inspired me to build something similar. Have you run into any thermal problems with these relays? The datasheet states a maximum contact resistance of 100mΩ, which would burn 25W per contact, so up to 50W in total. Would love to get some info on that point!
I have their standard leaf granny charger and would love to modify so could charge as 6, 8 and 10 amp . Is this possible and if so is their any info on how?
Pls do update vids, subscribed
Quick note about the Mennekes plug, it can support way more than 22kW. From the top of my head 43kW for AC and +100kW for DC.
500V, 63A for 3 phase or 80A for single phase, 200A for DC
Not being critical, just enquiring... I'm an electrician in Australia, and have never done any design for compliance etc. I guess you're using the capacitors to provide the switching current to the relays, but I question the use of Latching relays. I understand the capacitors store enough energy to unlatch the relays if the power drops off, but I would have thought the relays would have to be the "normal" electromagnetic type that naturally act as an Under Voltage protection fail safe in the case of loss of voltage or electronics failure? If something did go wrong the Latching Relays could potentially remain latched. Am I missing something, or is this a standard method that is compliant? As I said, I'm not trying to be critical, just curious, as a lot of electrical equipment has relays or contactors, not only as needed for switching the high current, but also to provide Under Voltage protection.
BTW, Nice explanation of the EVSE workings. I have a Leaf with the Nissan EVSE, but looking at building a 15 amp EVSE. Cheers.
There are three things that work in my favor:
1) The standard does not specify or stipulate any type of relay; it merely states that the external contacts on the J.1772 compliant plug need to be disconnected from mains in all states except for the charging states. The contacts may carry mains voltage for up to 1 second when changing states, and this includes device turn-on and fault modes.
2) The capacitors and some firmware logic indeed make sure the contacts are latched off on loss of power or any illegal state change.
3) When there is a loss of power, even if the relays are latched on, they will not carry mains voltage. When the device subsequently starts up, as a precautionary measure the relays are forced off. There will be a split-second of mains voltage on the contacts, but this is still within spec.
Of course, the main thing against my approach is that in case of some sort of catastrophic failure, the relays may remain latched on, causing mains voltage to appear over the contacts. However, I would contend that purely on a compliance basis, this isn't part of the spec (and indeed quite common practice in e.g. smart plugs).
In the end, this is a design decision that I had to make. There simply isn't enough room in the enclosure for a large enough power supply to continuously power relays. The J.1772 standard was written - originally - in the late 90s and assumed very crude, slow logic. This is also why the connector itself has quite extreme physical safeguards; you would have to force water into the contacts and submerge the entire connector to even cause an issue with mains voltage being present. And for that, they even included a requirement for a rubber cap. Belt and braces all the way, so even though I explicitly state the charger design is NOT compliant, I still regard it as safely usable when installed correctly.
No worries. Thanks for taking the time to reply.
Oh PLEASE tell me you made these to sell!!!
If not. Can I get instructions / a diagram???
*Begs*
im in scotland , i love my 2016 leaf 30 , thankyou for the info , would like to have cable like you, cables i have are pain to :) but your design is way above me :) but its interesting , does it reduce the charge current as the battery charges then? ive seen on aliexpress one called zencar, could i change the end to comando plug? it has different charge currents . i use the granny charger giving me 10a as dont have dedicated 32a at my house. thabks for posting, ah you in netherlands , i love cycling their, ive had 2 cycling holidays up throu freesland brilliant country :) soon as we are allowed to travel i would like to come aain :) with brexshit hope they let me in :)
In the UK the granny cable runs at 10 Amps as our mains plugs are only rated to 13 Amps. I guess this would make it easier to make one of these devices? I can't understand why no comercial ones are not available. Great work and thanks for the video.
fantastic work, in case it hasn't been answered already. I understand that the reason for the requirement to have the controller with 30cm of the outlet is to avoid the risk of live cables being exposed in an accident.
I imagine a solution to make your controller fully compliant would be to replace the wall plug with a 'Plastic Plug Enclosure' and place the board in there.
do u you have any schematics and microcontroller connection diagrams of your project.
if so can you share them with me i am working an a similar project.
Care to share your schematics to a humble diy enthusiast? Especially the 20mA detector part.
Hi, great project! I was wondering if interested in doing a project together. Please contact me by email. Thanks
This is awesome! 6 years late to the party but just as impressed 😁
Dope design and idea, but are all j1772 evse systems equal, like if you used a nissian charger on a Prius phev, cus I got a Prius but not willing to spend 200 for a charger from amazon that not functioning in 6 month
It is appreciated wot you or doing please don't give up I have a G Wiz and struggling to charger it I live in a tent in the back of a van so it's difficult to find a changing point that excepts three pin plug I'd like to charge at a tipe 2 charger but struggle if you have eney ideas that would help it would be appreciate
Nice higher amps smaller hope the big boys take on broad your idea good video only thing i wanted more info on was the A to F programming charge status
The big companies need to improve rapidly. Carring these bricks is terrible these days. Nice vid
PVC cable is just due to cost, rubber cable is nice, but easy(-ish) to tear (most of them are, at least the ones I've tried), for really fuck-all cable use PUR insulated - doesn't go stiff when cold and is abrasion resistant.
Take that construction concept, and throw it on the ground a few times like many consumers do, and see how it does.
Done that, even driven over it already. So far, just the LED has broken off. Note that I've potted the electronics in the meantime, so there's very little that can go wrong. I'm now in the process of constructing a revised version which fixes all the routing issues and reduces the electronics size a bit more, hopefully that'll be something I can sell or at least share.
do you throw gas nozzels onto the ground? if you do that to almost anything you're just asking for issues to arise.
I keep thinking back to this video. I didn't realize that the EVSE doesn't really do ANYTHING to the charging current provided to the car. I wonder, then, if it's possible to have something like a J1772-to-wall-outlet adapter. What would be involved with that.
To whit - I have a 2002 GEM car that charges from a standard wall outlet. I'd love to have more options of where to charge it.
Thought 1: If a J1772 charging station can provide 110 AC current, what could be done to convince the charger that it's attached to a car and to provide that current.
Thought 2: Or is it the case that the public charging station only provides one kind of current (probably 220) and there's no way to get it to step down to a lower voltage.
There actually are J1772 chargers than can be put on the GEM car, but I don't want to lose the ability to charge from an ordinary 110 outlet with no EVSE.
- - -
Edit: Someone apparently sells this already on ebay. It claims to work with devices that can accept 220v. I should have checked before commenting.
bcoz this is not - charger in car is simply MODULE for 110-240V - so without any "singal" it should work - signal is for more safety
This Leaf only has a ~3 kW onboard charger. So sad.
would you sell a couple of those boards that you have designed?
Reasen for that rule is that a dumb part of a cable is as short as posible... I would be interested in one that can go from 6A to 20A and could be pluged in 230v or 380v...
not better - now if there is a fault the cord stays live...
Are you still using this, have you run into any issues? Thank You
Hello, I appreciate the improvement you did. Can I get the controller board? did you start to implement level 2 EVSE?
I think this will be more applicable
Could you talk about ground current from switching converters and why you had to use a line frequency transformer? That must have been annoying for a power electronics guy!
hi, fried, may be share diagram?
I would like to buy one ...
I did some calculations on building a remote charging station for my Kia Niro due to outlet being a long way away (~50m thick forrest). However with lithium batteries that would cost about 7500 USD (!!) (and weigh 70kg) for 73% charge. With three classic lead batteries for trucks it would weigh 195kg (!!) and cost about 1000 USD. So I guess this is only an alternative if you, like the guy in the video, just need a few extra miles.
Rent a mini-digger for the weekend. Get some good quality rubber cable (ask an electrician what ya need) and you'r set?
Great video, i was wondering if on a Prius Plug-in 2013, will the charging time decrease?? Thanks
No. It is just to make the charger smaller.
I am new to this so forgive me if I don't make sense, is that AC 230v going into the car, if so when does it change to DC for the batteries
The charger is in the car. It's whats converting the AC to DC. This is just the electronics that is there to make this a bit safer. However it is not following the standard as he states in the video. The control relays have to be no more than 30 cm from the electrical source to be able to make the cable powerless before it touches the ground (it's presumed you have the outlet on a post above ground not in a box sunk down into the street like in the video :) ).
Is there anything like this on the market (with the EVSE in the handle)?
Yes, there is.
i need one of this.....
Nice little project, I was quite surprised at how simple, yet complex the requirements are.
Shame the standard made such cables non-compliant.
On the plus side, you won't die by one of those "rated" cables :-)
Dude , Can you show up the circuit of the PCBA ? what ingredients did you use for communication part ?
There's going to be an update fairly soon, I just did a revision of the board!
@@PowerElectronicsBlog did you ever release these updated boards?
I would be glad to buy one of these chargers, 120V + 220V! Do you have a website?
Not quite yet, but working on it this week!
Leaf owners are indebted to you. I hope you solve the various aerodynamic problems with the Leaf as well, like closing the back wheel wells!
Great project!
Would you be willing to put a parts list up
Not quite yet, I don't consider it safe enough for anybody to just copy and think it's alright.
Neat
Would it be a problem to convert the Leafs type 1 plug to a type 2?
Nope, it's 100% compatible. The only 'downside' is that you can't actually take any advantage of the extra 2 phases on a Mennekes plug. The upside is that you can lock the cable in the charging port, so nobody can interrupt your charging session.
PowerElectronicsBlog
It makes sense! The reason for my doubt is that I called Nissan last year about it, and they said that it was not compatible. That really puzzled me as the "type1 to type2" cable is just a cable with the to different types of plugs on each end...
The reason why I would like to do the the conversion is that all public destination chargers with cable. here in Denmark is equipped with the type2 plug. And many home chargers also....
Hi.
That was nice done. what is the slowest charge speed possible to charge a Leaf? 230 10A is to fast. :D
It will charge on 115V/6A, but the J1772 spec doesn't allow for less than 6A, so on a 230V outlet the minimum speed is 230V/6A or about 1.4kW. It's probably possible to experiment with slower charging by seeing if the car accepts less than 10% PWM on the CP input.
thanks for you answer. 230V/6A sounds right. my portable generator is 1.6 kW constant. :P is that possible with original nisssan granny charger? I dont have a ev car yet. but next year I am planing to buy one. are you selling your ev? :P
If it's a gas generator, you're going to be stressing it A LOT by drawing 1.4kW from it continuously. These generators usually only really cope with 60-70% of their rated continuous capacity. I'm not sure if you can expect to reliably recharge it from such a generator. Also, it's quite expensive, you should only use that in emergencies or when you are really far away from civilization. Most public chargers are much cheaper and more reliable - and they charge your car a lot faster too.
Yes that is what i was thinking. emergencies only. other solution is a 12/24v -> 230v inverter and to have a gas generator to charge batteries to the inverter :D here in Finland we dont have public chargers outside the main road. some "shoko" you can find but even that's hard. especially around at my moms summer place that is off grid xD
PVC Cables are just Cheaper.
Ugh, car manufacturers cheaping out in the worst places... I hope there are better technical reasons, but I can't think of any.
According to my Supplier: Heavy-Rubber-Cable(H07RN-F) costs about 1,60€/m, Light Rubber Cable(H05RR-F) 1,50€/m and PVC-Cable(H05VV-F) 1,06€/m
edit: seems to be not the case read reactions why
the design is at much more points not compliant with the j1772
the 2 things i can say on the top of my head.
1. there is no diode check. the j1772 states that the 1kHz square wave should be from -12 to +12 Volts. and that only the +12 volt part should be loaded. so if the square wave drops to 9 or 6 volts it should go from -12 to +9 or +6.
if the relays switch the line voltage on only a resistor it is not compliant
2. the other thing is that it is not allowed that the charger directly goes from state A to C. like you're demonstrating with the 880 Ohms resistor the resistance should first be 2.74k Ohms and go from there to 880 Ohms. if you directly connect 880 Ohm(with a diode) it should not go to state C.
stating that the only thing that makes the charger not compliant is the length of the mains wire is wrong.
without knowing the actual electronic circuit it looks like it could be compliant with a software update
It's fully compliant on all the points you've raised. In fact, I pretty much reimplemented SmartEVSE for an AVR.
For the demonstration, I didn't want to bother with a diode check or fumbling with multiple resistors just to show the concept, and likewise the video was getting pretty long, so I flashed the firmware in debug mode. This foregoes the GFI check (which you can see - the GFI transformer has no wires running through it) and a bunch of other stuff. It also does not implement any of the delays and delay checks.
As far as I can dig into J1772, I implemented everything I could except for the wire length.
PowerElectronicsBlog ah Nice you did implement those things. It aren't safety features made-up for fun. Nice you got it in this small form. You might get rid of one relay if you make sure you're certain of the installation off the mains wire. If the line and the neutral are always on the same position you might get away with only switching the live wire.
If you use something else than a schucko to make sure of the correct connections
Don't know if that is j1772 complaint by the way
Because Schuko is unpolarized (can be plugged in either way), I know for sure that it's not acceptable to do unipolar switching. This killed me on my first mains power project 2 years ago, had everything ready to go for CE testing and failed on the intake interview because I showed it only having one relay... waste of a few weeks, especially considering the testing facility only had free slots every couple of weeks.
J1772 does not specify anything on the mains connection side as far as I can tell. I don't have the official full specification, though, because that is very expensive to buy. So I have to work off free pdfs and a family member who works with one SAE commission...
PowerElectronicsBlog shame about the CE compliance. I know how expensive those test are :( I once worked somewhere where is did have the j1772 specification. If you don't use a schucko but just wire the thing up to the mains in a installation box i think it is ok. I don't recall everything about it. I does say something about the mains switching.
I know that the German specification is way cheaper. You can also buy IE specifications in Estonia saves a lot of money and it are European regulated specifications so they are the same. but for a one time only project they are way to expensive.
other tip on those full specifications if you happen to know some engineering students at your local hacker space it can be easy to revieuw those EU regulated specifications via NEN-connect
Hm, those are great suggestions. I'm definitely going to try that. Are the document prices tied to like... local GDP? Would Romania be even cheaper then?
The hard thing for me to justify this cost is that I don't know where the costs will end. Most SAE documents are extremely incomplete and require lots of additional purchases. They reference other standards or in some cases you pay 30 bucks and only get a summary document that says absolutely nothing of technical value. So unless I know for sure that I'm going to get the FULL J1772 technical reference for X amount of money, I'm hesitant to spend any money on it. Same goes for IEC standards; I made that mistake before trying to get a hold of the IEC 60950-1:2014. God, that's a nightmare to get.
U r amazing sir u r real hobbyists in EV segment
Love to see future hack, modification ,upgrade in EV design and stuff,
Thank again for sharing such a wonderful information and knowledge to us.
Kind of fake advertising to call an AC protection circuit a "charger". It wouldn't be hard to either have a user settable setting option in the car for AC charging, or even automate it based on voltage drop as done in this overpriced magic box. This is as ridiculous as when printer manufacturers sold printers without USB cables! So don't build it into the socket, put it in the car behind the connector in the car and use a potentiometer to set current and use any dumb cable you like. Which
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Waarom moet alles bij jou een kwestie van massa productie zijn? Kun je mensen gewoon niet helpen er voor te zorgen dat we allemaal in NL schonere lucht in kunnen ademen? De huidige ev prijzen zijn zo hoog dat rond de 90% van de mensen niet eens een ev kunnen betalen. Even 40duizen voor de nieuwe leaf zonder goede batterij managment systeem is ruim boven wat ik over heb voor een auto