CIP.io Link is a next-generation, user-friendly evolution of CIP.io, designed for local site deployment of energy management and EV charging solutions. Developed as part of the EVs@Scale initiative, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, CIP.io Link leverages Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware to provide a flexible and scalable platform for managing EV charging infrastructure.
CIP.io stands for Common Integration Platform. It is a set of open source applications working together in order to provide a basic way of communicating with each other and external hardware such as meters and services.
Its main focus is to act as a easily deployable Charge Station Management System (CSMS) that exists locally on sites where EV charging is taking place. It is designed to be a research platform for site and campus-level energy controls.
CIP.io Link is an open-source project, enabling broad community collaboration and extensibility.
- Designed as a plug-and-play platform for easy smart charge management.
- Functions as a research platform for site and campus-level energy controls.
- Tailored to support experimental setups and foster innovation in VGI and energy management.
CIP.io Link bridges the gap between research and real-world application, enabling smoother adoption of modern energy management technologies at scale.
- Provides a local CSMS user interface
- Includes instructions for integrating OCPP-compliant charging stations (OCPP 1.6j)
- Manage multiple EV charging stations
- Manage EV drivers and their charging sessions
- Track charging transactions and energy consumption
- Employ charge management strategies to optimize energy use and prevent overloads
- Time-series database for data storage and analysis
- MQTT broker for efficient site-level messaging
- Customizable smart charge management
CIP.io Link brings cutting-edge energy management tools into an integrated, on-site platform, enabling efficient, reliable, and scalable EV charging solutions.
By default, the CIP.io Link installer installs the following:
- Docker (if not already installed)
- The following containerized apps
- Node-Red
- InfluxDb (v2)
- ValKey (Redis fork)
- Grafana
- Mosquitto MQTT broker
- Portainer container manager
- git, crul, and jq (if not already installed)
| Web Reference | Docker Hub Reference |
|---|---|
| Grafana | Grafana |
| Node-Red | Node-Red |
| InfluxDb | InfluxDb |
| ValKey | ValKey |
| Mosquitto | Mosquitto |
| Portainer | Portainer |
CIP.io Link is designed to run on a local server or edge device. Although it may be possible to deploy CIP.io Link on a single board computer such as a Raspberry-Pi5, all testing has been done on Intel slim platform devices such as Dell Optiplex and Lenovo/Intel NUC devices. The following hardware specifications are recommended:
- Minimum 8GB RAM
- Minimum 128GB SSD/HDD
- i5 or equivalent processor
- Hardwired Ethernet or Wi-Fi connection
- OS installation:
- Mouse and keyboard
- USB port for initial installation of OS if not already installed
- Linux (Ubuntu 24.04 LTS recommended, desktop works well)
Currently, this installation has only been tested on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. We hope to add other variations of Linux in the future. The installation script is designed to run on a fresh install of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
Once the OS/Linux is installed it requires that you have root access (sudo) in order to install Docker and other parts.
CIP.io Link is designed to run headless (no monitor, keyboard, or mouse) and can be accessed via a web browser on another device on the same network. You may wish to enable SSH access to the device in order to manage it remotely.
[ 👉 You may wish to read this entire README file and Wiki prior to running the install script]
Open up a command line terminal and change directories to the location you wish to install CIP.io Link. You must have permissions in this folder to create files and folders. Upon execution of the installation script, and new folder will be created name CIP.io Link. This is where everything is installed and run from.
You do not need to initially run the script as root (sudu). The script will prompt you for your root password when it runs.
To install, click the "[copy]" button in the following code sample, then paste that into your terminal to execute.
wget -q https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Argonne-VCI/CIP.io-Link/main/scripts/install.sh -O /tmp/install.sh && \
chmod +x /tmp/install.sh && \
/tmp/install.shThe above lines of code will do the following:
- Download the initial install script to the /tmp folder on your system and run it
- Verify that git, curl, jq, and Docker are installed
- Download the remainder of the files needed from this repository
- There is no need to manually "git clone" this repository prior to installation. The script will do that for you.
- Prompt you for information needed to run CIP.io Link
- Create a default user and password used by the various components/containers
- Prompt you for the port number you wish to associate with the CSMS URL
- Prompt you for a route (or path) to associate with the CSMS URL
- It will create a random password used by ValKey (Redis). Taking the default is recommended.
- Setup and configure various docker containers and run them
When finished, a URL for accessing the CIP.io Link dashboard will be displayed. You can enter that into a browser to access the dashboard.
You can find out more about Docker HERE.
Once installed, your Linux user will also be added to the "docker" user group on your system. This will keep you from having to sudu your account in order to do to certain docker activities (docker pull/up/down/ps). You may have to exit and restart your terminal in order for this to take affect the first time.
- ISO-15118 Charge Scheduling Application
- Acts as a local OCPP node