After lots of testing with our Powered by Monta partners, we are happy to announce the launch of the Monta Hardware Portal, a platform for hardware manufacturers to get valuable and actionable insights on their charge points in order to improve the quality and stability of their products.
Below we tell you all about the Hardware Portal and what you can do on it, including:
- Remote firmware updates;
- OCPP compatibility testing with our free OCPP Toolkit.
Learn more below.
What is the Hardware Portal?
Hardware manufacturers work together with numerous Charge Point Management Softwares (CPMS) and have little to no insights into how their charge points are being used, how customers experience them, what type of issues may occur, and so on. Such data is essential for improving existing models and developing new ones, basic bug fixing and improving stability and OCPP connection.
This is where Monta’s Hardware Portal comes along.
The Hardware Portal allows manufacturers to benchmark their charge points against other brands, leverage insights on performance and usage data, or simply troubleshoot and solve issues faster as they get access to the necessary charge point logs.
Here’s what you can do in the Hardware Portal:
- Access insights into usage and performance
- Charge point logs: Understand usage patterns and issues
- Ratings: User ratings per charge session on all your charge points
- Benchmarking against competitors: How you perform against competitors
- Stability issues: What type of stability issues you have and how they can be solved
- (Coming soon) Firmware & testing: Firmware upload and integration testing.
At the moment, the Hardware Portal is available only for ‘Powered by Monta’ partners. You can find more information about the ‘Powered by Monta’ partnership here.
We believe hardware plays an essential role in the EV world and it is in everyone’s best interests to raise the standards of all hardware manufacturers and improve the charging ecosystem.
Push firmware updates directly from the Monta Portal and App
Solving issues related to firmware updates on hardware often requires charge point operators or site owners to visit the charge point location and/or use another tool outside of the Monta Portal, both being resource-consuming and disruptive.
Not being able to push firmware updates as soon as they are available increases the risk of having unstable charge points, which directly influences the customer’s experience. To solve that, pushing firmware updates will be possible from the Monta Portal and App.
If you’re a hardware manufacturer interested in enabling this feature, reach out via this form and send us your newest firmware files so that charge point owners can update their charge points.
Our plan is to make uploading firmware files possible directly from the Hardware Portal, so stay tuned for more info regarding that.
Test compatibility with our free OCPP Toolkit
As a manufacturer, testing the OCPP implementation of your charge point model and firmware is essential to ensuring the stability and quality of your hardware when used together with a backend like Monta.
Due to the volume of the hardware integration requests we get, we have put together a free OCPP toolkit so you can connect your charge points and test the OCPP implementation yourself directly from the Hardware Portal. You can also access the toolkit here.
The OCPP toolkit, as it is now, allows you to do an initial test to see if your hardware is compatible with the Monta backend. That way, you know if you request an official compatibility test with Monta that it will go smoothly.
We believe the future of compatibility tests should be more automated, which is why official compatibility tests with the Monta backend will be available through the Toolkit soon, where manufacturers can perform the tests on their own in a more automated manner.
More features are added on a continuous basis – check out the new features in the Hardware Portal from March 2023 here!
Charge Point Integrations – New models added
We have added 12 new charge point models in the past month, making us integrated with 280 models in total now! See the full list here (available in English).
Check out our Public Roadmap for the Monta Portal
Our Public Roadmap displays what you and fellow Monta users wish to see in the Monta Portal and the status of us turning those wishes into reality.
Feel free to submit your feature requests or improvements right there.
Explore our Public Roadmap here.
We love hearing from you.
