so what happens when a member of your team drops their mobile phone
down a chemical toilet at a music festival stay tuned for that answer along with other
questions we've been asked about the zaptech pro ev charger yeah the zaptec pro packed full
of innovative technology and people loved the review we did of that one point however caused a bit of
questions in the comments and that's the concept of power line control so basically
communicating with this charger via the internet but sending the data down the mains wiring so
it may have been my question as well how does that really happen and how can that information
transmit itself down mains voltage yeah well some people do know how that happens and that
was the data installers who were very busy the comments under that when we released a little
video teasing about how we did the install so i thought we'd best set up a little demo to
show you how that works so let's plot the root of the cable and give you a little sneak behind the
scenes here at line side studios as we come out of our zaptec pro our cable goes into our loot and
top to board through our way go energy meter into a steel conduit then through a steel trunk in and
ends up at our schneider distribution board and that three-phase breaker so across at the
distribution board yeah the wiring for the charger ends up here through this circuit breaker here so
now we've got to get the internet signal onto that mains wiring let's just close that for a moment
and we're going to look at this box here so people often ask us consumer electronics not really built
for an industrial environment uh we use these little Deboxes here but i've already broken
Routledge's rule of enclosures i wish i'd picked a bigger one because we end up putting more and
more stuff in there uh inside here we've got our mobile internet router there but we're not going
to be using that today we're going to be using our fixed wiring and one of these so this is a tp-link
powerline adapter um so plugs into the 13 amp socket at that end obviously different
countries have different ones and in the bottom here you'll see there's an rj45 socket outlet
so in there we're going to put our internet connection from our ethernet network which i've
borrowed one here in true blue peter fashion so it really is that simple plug this in here
plug that in there switch on and back to the bench bit of wizardry there gordon however i notice you
put that onto a single phase socket outlet so am i presuming that that data now is everywhere
within line side studios it is on that phase yeah absolutely now so yeah data over the mains wiring
on the l1 phase which that socket's connected to which with a bit of look we've had there
because also the zaptec takes the power for the power line communication with its built-in
adapter off the l1 phase you don't have to add any additional hardware this is all built into
the charge that's good at the moment it's using the 4g mobile signal connectivity to get its
internet but we're now going to move across from that now and you're thinking why would
you want to change from that well you might be in an underground car park lots of concrete in
there and it may be very difficult to get a 4g signal to the ev charging point so you might be
thinking install some access points and have it on the wi-fi well that can be quite expensive
and this looks so far like a really easy solution does it yeah well it's all built in and those
adapters are competitively priced so he has no additional cost in terms of hardware swapping over
pairing up dead easy so we'll just run through that process so i've got the zaptec app here
um so i'm just going to go in and configure a charger so it's searching using bluetooth
immediately finds the charger we just uh log in put in the pin number all right pin number
do you remember it well second time i do yeah there you go i get the little beep and a little
nice little white glow there on there so i'm now in the charger i can see on my display now it's 4g
i'm just going to click on here onto the power line and immediately on the screen here i can
see there's three devices on the network okay so one is the charger itself the other ones
that are adapted at that end also and we'll come on to it i've got the laptop here working on the
network as well um so it's the case and now we're just going into that and press the pair button
start the pairing process and at the other end we go and push the button gary so you go and
wander off and push that pair button on there i will do it press and hold just press it once
yeah and then our device is now online and paired and that set up the security between the charger
and the uh connector the plug-in connector at that end so that's it we're now on power line um so
i'll just save that this is that simple yeah that's that simple on there but just to check
obviously you might not believe us i've just just had a phone on there we're going to log in on the
zaptec portal on this laptop here scroll down uh here's the charger behind us which obviously
we've connected to and if we just hover over this box here we'll see that communication mode is now
plc or power line communication yeah now at this point this is where the people who love data and that's
those people probably fit in data centers this is not an amazon call center on the india yeah wow
breaking news it is just an ev charger and we're not transmitting enormous amounts of data it's
just to run the charger manage the users of the charger but just to show powerline control isn't
a new technology it's been around for decades now i've got the laptop connected to it and all the
communication between that and the charge has gone down the power line in this end and coming
back out on that end it does work at reasonably high bandwidths of data but just not possibly if
you're installing amazon call centers so why are you in the portal what else can it do i can do
lots of things again including this cool feature here um click on the charger we can run a little
electrical test now why you'd want to do this remotely i don't know but we're next to it and you
get to hear this you get to hear the relays inside clicking so if i just run a little grid test
yes wow satisfying yeah that's actually the relays uh what would happen is you can put single phase
charges you can select which fares you're going to connect them to right so that's not this charger
that's the actual people forget the charge is actually in the car yes and if that's uh of
all cars are all connected to the same phase you could have a bit of a problem in terms of power
balance and you can share single phase loads equally amongst the different phases if you had
lots of different charges so we've got 12 ev charges out and we could divide them between
those pieces and that's what those relays do but anyway you can check that but what you'd really
want to be doing inside this portal is managing users of the charges okay imagine these are all
designed for those communal areas so you're in an apartment block car park you don't necessarily
want just anyone plugging in and charging so could you give me charging right then could i use this
ev charger here well if you insist on it i'll say it was a charger so i can do that in the portal
um yeah sign you so you get an email uh to welcome you to the community gary
okay so obviously read that email okay but you're gonna set me with a nice little tag
you're talking about you can so again i can do that in the in the tag so um these little
rfid tags got a serial number on there i can add that to your account put that in the post to you
okay so it'll be some days before i can use this ev charger is that right no so once you're in
there download the zaptec app okay and you can use bluetooth to access the charger using the app
and that's what i really like about this there's the the app for the installer and the end user
and then you've got this back office portal they're not they're not mutually exclusive you
can chop and change behind but users you manage on the portal as we've just done there and that's
set up straight away so i can use it on my phone and that links us back to that lovely story at the
start then with the the loose phone in the hand that ended up in a chemical toilet a festival
i'd like to say for the record i didn't own that phone no it wasn't me either okay one of the team
wasn't it was one of the team and had we not lost the phone in the chemical toilet this video could
have been out a lot earlier because some of the uh some of the footage of screen recordings was on it
um but that means when that tag does come into post you've got two options of actually
activating the charging process haven't we yeah and that's what people like you know at certain
times of day you don't want to be uh yeah you may have forgotten your phone you may have dropped
your phone yes you may have dropped it down the chemical toilet the added secure a little rfid tag
um but you don't need to connect me to do that i could send you a new tag right and you can enable
it through the app yourself okay so i've received two tags you send me one you've activated for me
and i've got the luxury of giving one maybe to the good wife so that's it shell up with
her own tag by simply going into the app finding the appropriate ad i've got a tag that i can pass
on to the wife yeah or you may have a visitor or somebody like that yeah it's very simple process
look yeah and it's equally as easy to remove afterwards for that visitor isn't it just going
to the same app and then obviously delete it and permission aware if you're coming late to
the party you want to check out the review of the zaptech pro check out the video just here