Using MQTT with the Raspberry Pi Pico W and HomeAssistant for an Optimized Solar Energy Electrical Vehicle Charger

I’m in the final stage of finishing a electrical vehicle (EV) charger controller, which optimizes battery loading using the available PV system: use as much as possible the solar energy and not the grid.

Raspberry Pi Pico W as a EV Charger Controller

While the controller talks with an Modbus (RS-485) interface to the vehicle charger itself (see Controlling an EV Charger with Modbus RTU), it uses MQTT over WiFi to get information about the available solar energy from HomeAssistant and the Powerwall.

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Introduction to Security and TLS (Transport Layer Security)

IoT (Internet of Things) is all about connecting to the internet. And even more it is about security. Without security and without encrypted communication, everyone possibly can see what I send or receive. And this is especially bad if passwords or user names are sent in an unencrypted way. So encryption and secure communication is key. The solution to that is to use a connection which uses the TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocol.

I want to use TLS for my MQTT communication (see “MQTT with lwip and NXP FRDM-K64F Board“). I’m still learning MQTT, and I’m even more learning about the fundamentals of security and security protocols. So this article is about what I have learned recently, and what I can use to make my data communication secure: Network stack architecture, symmetric and asymmetric encryption and certificates.

Certificate Based Key Exchange

Certificate Based Key Exchange

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Tutorial: lwip with FreeRTOS and the Freescale FRDM-K64F Board

This tutorial is about how to create a lwIP project with FreeRTOS using the Kinetis SDK V1.3.0 with Kinetis Design Studio on the Freescale FRDM-K64F board.

FRDM-K64F Board with lwIP running

FRDM-K64F Board with lwIP running

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