This post is part of a series about Prism, an open charging station

I will not stress you with the usual catastrophic global warming stuff, you can read plenty about that online. However it’s no coincidence that my love for electronics and efficiency drove my career straight into one of the fields that was promising a huge impact on that front: Electric Mobility.

This is the story of a journey that started a few years ago, when I and a friend with this same passion started a company to be part of this revolution, with big ideas for the future and small pockets.
But you have to start somewhere, so we tackled one of the most annoying problems we had as EV drivers: charging.
You can charge your vehicle at home with an EVSE cable, but that’s only a temporary solution as the charging rate is very slow (~10km/h) and it’s usually not very safe as plugs in Europe are not designed for that kind of continuous load. This solution is also ugly and dumb because you can’t control the charging rate and you easily trip the main circuit breaker if you use other loads in the house. Reducing the charging current when other loads are connected is a very basic feature, but at that time the only device offering it was the OpenEVSE (we’ll talk about it later). Even today, only a few brands offer this feature, and it’s usually a quite expensive optional.
And while we’re at it, why can’t we also sync with our solar inverter and charge only when the sun is shining, if we’re not in a hurry? Again, only an OpenEVSE connected to an OpenEnergyMonitor can do this.

So we built ourselves an OpenEVSE, and we were happy for a while. But oh, there’s so much to improve! It doesn’t have ethernet (WiFi in the garage was very flaky), it was only single phase, and it looked (and still looks imho) too much like an hobbyist project.

We also had the chance to test some commercial products, and when one exploded on us we decided it was time to make things right. And the idea of Prism was born.

In the next article we will see some competitors and what we learnt from them. Stay tuned!