EV Charging

EVSE Expansion Board

This application guide provides an overview and usage guide for PHYTEC’s EV Charger Expansion Board (PEB-X-005) - an accessory designed for developers to start evaluation of key circuitry and communication interfaces for a Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment (EVSE) design right at your desk. This guide covers evaluation of one PEB-X-005 board to bring up the PLC interface as well as connecting two systems to take the next step of SLAC communication. The Lumissil PLC is well suited for this type of development since the same hardware can be utilized for the EVSE and Plug-In Electric Vehicle (PEV)

Learn more or order the accessory kit here: https://www.phytec.com/product/evse-expansion-board/

Front view of component Back view of component
  • Lumissil IS32CG5317

    • Interfaces with the phyCORE-AM62x SOM via a SPI bus.

    • Allows for HomePlug Green PHY low power communication

    • Choose simulation mode via firmware load at runtime

      • Electric Vehicle Simulation

      • Electric Vehicle Charger Simulation

  • TI MSPM0 Microcontroller

    • Integrated for Basic Charging using the ADC on the chip.

Attaching phyBOARD-Lyra AM62x + PEB-X-005

  • Requirements:

    • phyCORE-AM62x: System on Module

    • phyBOARD-Lyra AM62x: Carrier Board

    • PEB-X-005: Expansion board with Lumissil IS32CG5317 HPGP

    • 5V USB-C Power Adapter (Included with Development Kit)

phyBOARD-Lyra AM62x + PEB-X-005

The PEB-X-005 is designed to be plugged in to the phyBOARD-Lyra AM62x’s X17 header.

phyBOARD-Lyra AM62x + PEB-X-005

When all combined, the system allows you to simulate either a car or a charger, depending on what firmware is loaded into the Lumissil IS32CG5317.

Simulating Car and Charger SLAC Communication

  • Requirements

    • 2 x phyBOARD-Lyra AM62x + PEB-X-005

    • 2 x Jumper Wires (Not Included)

    • 2 x 5V USB-C Power Adapter (Included with Development Kit)

2xphyBOARD-Lyra AM62x + PEB-X-005

Note

The EVSE Expansion uses firmware provided by Lumissil. PHYTEC maintains a Yocto layer for installing the software.

For this demo the two phyBOARD-Lyra AM62x + PEB-X-005 can be used to simulate the communication of a car and charger over a SLAC link.

Yocto Project - Prepare The BSP

Before adding the firmware make sure you are able to enter our Podman container and build the standard BSP. Please follow the Build the BSP guide before continuing.

Installing the Firmware

The firmware can be found in the meta-lumissil-greenphy git repo. To include the firmware we can do the following from within our container:

  1. Initialize the BSP Environment:

Source the build environment (a build directory and the $BUILDDIR environment variable will be automatically setup):

sh-container:~$ source sources/poky/oe-init-build-env

  1. Move to your Yocto Projects sources/ directory and clone the meta-layer:

sh-container:~$ cd $BUILDDIR/../sources
sh-container:~$ git clone -b scarthgap [email protected]:phytec/meta-lumissil-greenphy.git

  1. Include the newly checked out layer in our Yocto Project:

sh-container:~$ bitbake-layers add-layer $BUILDDIR/../sources/meta-lumissil-greenphy

  1. Finally move into the build directory and build our image. From our {yocto-project} we can run the following:

sh-container:~$ cd $BUILDDIR
sh-container:~$ bitbake phytec-lumissil-greenphy-image

This will build the phytec-headless-image and include the lumissil-greenphy software.

Note

You can check the phytec-lumissil-greenphy-image.bb file to see how the packages are included for reference if your adding the software to your own image.

Running Simulation

With our image built and booted to a Linux, we can set the config files to bring up the IS32CG5317 in the correct configuration.

On PEV board run:

sh-phyboard-lyra-am62xx-3:~# cp /lib/firmware/spi_sta_config.bin /lib/firmware/config.bin
sh-phyboard-lyra-am62xx-3:~# reboot

On EVSE board run:

sh-phyboard-lyra-am62xx-3:~# cp /lib/firmware/spi_cco_config.bin /lib/firmware/config.bin
sh-phyboard-lyra-am62xx-3:~# reboot

Once the boards have rebooted, you can initiate communication between boards by running the following SLAC commands:

On the PEV run:

sh-phyboard-lyra-am62xx-3:~# pev -p /etc/pev.ini -i seth0

On the EVSE run:

sh-phyboard-lyra-am62xx-3:~# evse -p /etc/evse.ini -i seth0

Confirm that connection happens and “Charging” prints on both terminals.

Note

For any technical questions, feel free to reach out to PHYTEC’s Support Portal!