Cloud ecosystem development for EV charging stations

The brief

MyBox is an enterprise manufacturer and supplier of EV charging stations from Eastern Europe. The company needed backend cloud infrastructure for operators and support teams, with mobile applications for end-users, effectively creating a complete EV charging management system.

Challenge

The most critical business challenge was developing a universal cloud platform for EV charging management to remotely connect, configure, and support thousands of EV chargers with different hardware and user flows.

The second part of the challenge was ensuring enterprise-grade security while keeping everything user-friendly on both sides – the vendor and the end-users – forming a robust EV charging back office software solution.

Solution

We reused the functionality of the 2Smart Cloud platform as a framework and developed a set of custom features on top of it, creating a versatile IoT platform for EV charging stations.

Reused platform features:

• MQTT Broker for managing devices.
• Collecting of time series data.
• Monitoring of connected device statuses.
• Statistics gathering for connected devices and online users.
• Versioning of the firmware.
• OTA updates support.
• Health monitoring of the platform itself.
• Integrations with Google Home, iOS shortcuts, messengers, and phone call control.
• Encrypted backups.
• Push notifications in mobile apps and service notifications in cloud app.

Custom developed features:

• Developed a web admin panel for charging station management system capabilities: custom telemetry visualizations, remote control, debugging, and configuration over connected EV chargers.
• Added flexible permission management.
• Implemented additional authentications for matching enterprise security demands.
• Developed a single, super-versatile firmware to ensure easy interconnection between different hardware, forming a robust cloud‑based EV charger control solution.
• Provided iOS and Android white-labeled mobile applications based on the 2Smart Cloud app.

Key features

Implementation of features in the development of a cloud-based ecosystem in Stage One:

• White-labeled mobile applications for EV charging stations.
• Cloud web panel for remote administration of thousands of EV chargers, with flexible multi-layer permissions management.
• Remote updates and configuration functionality for EV charger management.
• Remote telemetry gathering.
• Ensured future scalability with the help of universal firmware that handles hardware from different vendors.

Features to be implemented in Stage Two:

• Generating custom reports for admins and consumers.
• Implementing a billing gateway for the public usage of the chargers.
• Developing the user flow for unregistered users to use public chargers without hassle.
• Developing custom mobile app widgets for in-depth configuration of connected devices.
• Developing a custom integration for third-party charging stations for connecting them to the system without refining the firmware of each charger.
• Implementing OCPP technology for EV charging and infrastructure integration.

Results

• Developed an enterprise-grade EV charging station management system that remotely manages and supports thousands of private and public EV chargers from different vendors.
• Successfully reused a big part of the platform`s functionality to cut the time to market drastically.
• On top of the existing functionality, we developed features such as advanced user permission management, custom data visualizations, and additional security measures.
• In addition, we developed a custom, super-flexible firmware for the ESP-C3 MCU controlling the chargers that ensures easy future support and scaling.
• Provided modern, comprehensive white-labeled mobile applications for end-users, creating a scalable EV charging infrastructure.