Background:
- At the moment, the most used CCS controller in EV conversions seems to be the BWM I3 LIM (viewtopic.php?t=1289). There are some other, but all of them rely on the availability of the original part, which is not open source, and need some workarounds to integrate it in the car.
- The AR7420, together with pyPLC on a Raspberry or similar is okay for experimentation, but not really an embedded solution. (viewtopic.php?t=2262)
- The AR7420, together with the ESP32-based WT32-ETH01 still uses an Ethernet cable, which is also not really automotive-like.
- There are some integrated boards available (e.g. RedBeet, YellowBeet, plc stamp, ...), which contain a QCA7000 and some of the parts around it, but: expensive, proprietary, not open-source.
Idea: Would it make sense and would it be possible to make a board from scratch, which contains a CAN-capable controller and a QCA7000/QCA7005?
What we know so far:
- A data sheet of the QCA7000 is here: viewtopic.php?p=28203#p28203
- A schematic (draft?) for the QCA7000 is available on github (https://github.com/Millisman/QCA7000)
- SPI recordings from OEM parts are available (e.g. viewtopic.php?p=57540#p57540).
- Hardware designs can be inherited from the many OEM designs.
- Content of the necessary SPI FLASH is known and can be just re-used. This contains the firmware and the configuration (PIB). (e.g. https://github.com/uhi22/Ioniq28Investi ... i-flash-u4)
- QCA7000 and QCA7005 are the same part, only the housing is slightly different (viewtopic.php?p=57030#p57030)
- The alternatives for QCA seem to be on the market, but not really available in terms of data sheets. (viewtopic.php?p=47381#p47381)
- A linux driver is available, this creates a virtual ethernet port, and could be run with pyPLC on a raspberry for first tests. (https://github.com/SmartEVSE/SmartEVSE-3/issues/25)
- A draft of embedded implementation of EVCC is available in https://github.com/uhi22/ccs32, this can be adapted to use SPI instead of ethernet.
What is missing, to continue this way? There was some NDA discussion somewhere, but from the available information, it seems possible to develop the board also without asking Qualcomm for documents.
Any feedback welcome
