Wallbox : Get The Most Of It (with API)

Background

Two month ago, I got myself a PHEV (Plug In Hybrid Electric Vehicle) and of course, thinking at the future, I also installed a class-2 charger at home. The obvious choice to me was the Wallbox Pulsar Plus charger. Small form factor, easy to set up, affordable and reliable. Wallbox software offering is great : centralized statistics on their website, mobile app, ... everything. But, is there any API available ? ;)

Of course there is!

Since the charger is connected to my network, I tried to directly connect to it. Only port 22 and 53 are opened. Yes, weird, port 53... In short, there is nothing you can do locally, you need to access the Wallbox portal to start playing with APIs.

I must admit that I was disappointed : no public documentation exists. Some people tried to integrate the home charger with some home automation platform like Jeedom, Homey or Home Assistant, but this is very light in terms of interactions and only provides elaborated code in either Python or JavaScript, I'm looking for the source APIs to create my own scripts.

What I was looking for was : getting charger details, current status, current configuration, lock/unlock remotely, get the statistics and play with it.... and anything else I could find on the way. Nothing available on the wallbox website, nothing available in the wallbox academy portal, .... very frustrating. 

Then, I started to do some reverse engineering on the plugins mentioned above and I've found some endpoints. Furthermore, using Chrome browser, you have the ability to sniff the API sent from the Wallbox official portal. Very interesting ;)

Wallbox APIs works in two stages : 

1) Get an authentication token;

2) Use the token to retrieve data for your charger(s)

The Token

The token is a 856 characters string which stays valid for 15 days. So, you need to manage that parameter and think at renewing it from time to time. Why not renewing it at each call you do ? I don't know what is the best practice at this point.

Here is the function to get the token : 

function wbGetToken($auth)

{

    $API="api.wall-box.com";

    $curl = curl_init();

    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);

    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array(

    "Authorization: Basic ".base64_encode($auth["username"].":".$auth["password"]),

        'Accept: application/json, text/plain, */*',

        'Content-Type: application/json;charset=utf-8'

));

    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);

    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, false);

    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, "https://".$API."/auth/token/user");

    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

    $result = curl_exec($curl);

    curl_close($curl);

    return json_decode($result)->jwt;

}

$auth is an array containing your credentials for accessing the wallbox portal.

Here is a sample : 

$auth=array(

    "username" => "your_email_address",

    "password" => "your_pass"

);

When successfully executed, the token is returned this way : 

string(856) "eyJhbGciOiJSUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJ1c2VybmFtZSI6Im[...]Qk1BqrVqaZZgVJ49wVuhI8GcrRGC_RwLw604FsMcYScMUZZmdVwBV2Vq_ioBhIFh9vMWgTi4DaZjtHuV--T82gTBJipJIZCnh7ABCDFP4WocIVzEZJM51UnQT4gjxk3nt8-iZY3kuXjbFOfMhMthjpj3fRWBQL8HvKwiMegGIY3c_N2tUVdLolVIPuZGyGQmWEv74wuZBBLrrv52KTzw65tKjjuYyejQnA_mXQNsnsbilE"

Of course, I have stripped the output for security reason.

The code

Now that we have a token, we have 15 days to issue any API calls we want :)

You need to know the charger ID of your charger to start interacting with it. This is easy to get, when on the Wallbox portal, you can see your charger ID in the URL :

Let's try to get something useful.

This function return all information about a specific charger : 

$chargerInfo=wbGetCharger($token,$id);

var_dump($chargerInfo);

$ php wallbox.php

object(stdClass)#4 (30) {

  ["id"]=>

  int(xxxxxx)

  ["uid"]=>

  string(26) "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"

  ["access"]=>

  bool(true)

  ["name"]=>

  string(20) "PulsarPlus SN XXXXXX"

  ["status"]=>

  int(161)

  ["chargerType"]=>

  string(10) "PulsarPlus"

  ["ocppReady"]=>

  string(9) "ocpp_1.6j"

  ["ocppConnectionStatus"]=>

  int(1)

  ["connectionType"]=>

  string(4) "wifi"

  ["locked"]=>

  int(0)

  ["maxChargingCurrent"]=>

  int(32)

  ["addedEnergy"]=>

  float(10.986)

  ["chargingPower"]=>

  int(0)

  ["chargingTime"]=>

  int(7437)

  ["energyUnit"]=>

  string(3) "kWh"

  ["powerUnit"]=>

  string(2) "kW"

  ["image"]=>

  string(55) "https://api.wall-box.com/uploads/PLP1-0-2-4-0-002-A.png"

  ["lastConnection"]=>

  int(1660242798)

  ["lastSync"]=>

  int(1660242936)

  ["wifiSignal"]=>

  int(75)

  ["chargerLoadType"]=>

  string(7) "Private"

[...]

From the above example, you see how easy it is to get some information about the charger, the status, the configuration, ... And there is more. 

I have created a quick code that display all the relevant information in one screen : 

Happy with this result, I decided to create a background script recording the various status during a charging session : energy injected against power of charge. This is leading to an interesting graphic : 

On this graph we see in orange the charging power in kW. My charger is capable (both the wallbox and the onboard charger in my car) of delivering 7.22 kW. Sometimes, the charging power is less, this is because my setup is equipped with a powerboost which is giving priority to the house. For example, when using the dishwasher or the frier, the energy demand for the house is higher, then the car is becoming secondary and the charger is lowering the load to prevent any circuit break down. This is a mandatory option in my opinion.

At the end of the charing session, we see the charging power is less, this is very common on EV when reaching the end of the charge.

The blue line is of course the energy delivered to the battery in kWh.

I'm still learning the API, and I'm also trying to get in touch with some Wallbox engineers but they are hard to get in touch with. I still have a lot of question of course ! ;)

All the information and scripts in this post can be found on my GitHub Repo.

• Token generator;
• Charger info page;
• Stat Collector;
• The entire framework and its documentation

More to come ...

I hope this helps !