AppCtrl®

AppCTRL® — Smart Charging for Facilities

Drive traffic to your website and your parking lot. Charging in your lot brings people in, and showing that charging live on your website helps them find you. AppCTRL® connects the two.

AppCTRL® is the Smart Service Systems platform from Pine Shore Energy LLC. It combines patent-pending UL 508A pedestals, software and service so facilities can manage EV charging, metering, storage, solar and HVAC equipment from one place, and keep running when the grid goes down.

This project started here in 2016 as a Drupal 8 module built on a simple service model:

[ASP] <--> [BUILDING] <--> [CMS]

An Application Specific Profile (ASP) is any equipment in a building that uses electricity to do a job, like charging, heating and cooling, lighting or energy storage. Equipment talks to the building, and the building talks to the web. That idea became AppCTRL®. The platform now runs on its own and connects to equipment over OCPP, Modbus TCP, BACnet, MQTT and manufacturer cloud APIs.

The project's next chapter brings that data back to Drupal:

[EVSE] <--> [AppCTRL®] <--> Drupal

The AppCTRL® module for Drupal 10 and 11 lets a store, campus, town or workplace show its chargers live on its own website, with a map of what's open right now and when the lots are busiest. It can also show energy use and site summaries with Views and blocks.

Submodules

Each equipment type has its own submodule, so a site enables only what it has:

• appctrl_evse: EV supply equipment (EVSE)
• appctrl_meter: electrical metering
• appctrl_storage: energy storage
• appctrl_solar: solar PV
• appctrl_hvac: ground-source heat pumps and VRF systems

The submodule names follow the original bundle idea: the AppCTRL® equipment connection and its matching Drupal submodule are specified together. That makes it easy for architects and engineers to include the features they want in the buildings they design.

Status

This is an early testing release that includes a demo data mode. Please report bugs and ideas in the issue queue.

Learn more at pineshoreenergy.com.