Different colour for ultra-rapid chargers?

Question
1

Has there been any thought to how to differentiate ultra-rapid chargers? A different colour maybe?

I’m thinking of perhaps 175+ kW being the cut off. This would mean that, for example, 50 kW public fast chargers and 120-150 kW Tesla superchargers (V2) would be orange; and then 175-350 kW public ultra-rapid chargers and 250 kW Tesla superchargers (V3) would be the next colour.

I notice your colours are identical to what Plugshare use - not sure who came first - but whatever is decided should probably remain consistent across both!

I can’t actually think of a good colour. Red has Tesla-specific connotations. Silver/gold perhaps, although silver looks like grey which is used for “in use” chargers.

2

Hi, yes we had different colours originally but as PlugShare is the defacto standard app in many countries it felt like the right thing to do to normalise the colour scheme at least. We don’t have any influence over PlugShare so we’d probably just go with something similar to what they use. Every now and again new apps become popular that have other ideas (there’s one I forget the name of that has manufacturer/connector colour schemes) or we could invent something new that users can choose.

If you are a developer we could use help, I have very little time to make changes currently. Icons are generated by an Inkscape script: https://github.com/openchargemap/ocm-docs/tree/master/Branding and icon selection is applied dynamically by the app depending on the characteristics of the POI : https://github.com/openchargemap/ocm-app/blob/master/src/app/core/Utils.ts#L50

3

Assuming that the color-scheme one is https://www.chargeway.net/easy-to-use/ it does make sense the more you look at it :slight_smile:

But yes, at least the “temporarily offline” stations should get a different color.

4

Stations with a offline status have a Wrench icon. No it’s unrelated to the chargeway colour scheme - I don’t understand that particular iconography! I’d say we are mostly aligned with PlugShare, as both OCM and PlugShare were started at roughly the same time.

5

Some more thoughts on this - note, I’ve also shared this with the supercharge.info editors:

1 Like
6

Thanks! So the topic of colour-blindness is pretty important if we were going to revise the colours, semantics is another - red normally implies danger! One thought there is that the power bands could be defined in configuration and colour scheme itself could be selectable (classic, red or green?). We’d need to mock it up - probably the easiest method is to modify the web app and point it to different icon sets to try them out.

If the colour goes from light to dark the iconography (out of service wrench, private access no-entry sign) needs to adapt/invert so we’d have to mock that up or provide alternatives.

7

Stations with a offline status have a Wrench icon.

Relatedly, should a station with Temporarily Unavailable equipment also show up on the map as a Not Operational one?
E.g. https://openchargemap.org/site/poi/details/131383 appears green on the map.

8

Yes, that would be a good/small fix to make for the app if you’d like to try.

I think we should possibly have made Temporarily Unavailable only accessible for imports/automation as it relies on a user coming back later and updating the status when the equipment is available again, whereas Not Operational serves much the same purpose. I think my original intention there was that we might get live status form a network that told us the equipment was under maintenance between certain hours etc, but that never happened. I made up most of these status types 9 years ago :slight_smile:

9

I’ll add this fix to the bottom of my to-do list :slight_smile:

As a workaround, I’ve set the station status for the aforementioned OCM-131383 to “Not Operational”, I guess I now have to wait for the change to be validated (it’s still green).

10

Yes, that edit went into the approvals queue and I’ve not approved it. I’ve also updated your account to be a country editor for Romania so now your changes for that country will take effect immediately. It can take a few minutes for caches to refresh etc (our API is load balanced across a couple of mirror sites) and you generally need to refresh your search to see changes.