Expose OCPP connection / heartbeat status for reliable offline detection

[dequinho]

Hi,

Would it be possible to expose the actual OCPP connection state, or add a heartbeat watchdog / connectivity binary sensor?

At the moment, the charger status entity can remain Available even when the THOR is completely offline.

I tested this with a Growatt THOR 07AS-PC:

1. Charger connected normally and Home Assistant showed Available.
2. I physically switched off the charger's circuit breaker.
3. After 2.5 minutes with the charger completely powered off, Home Assistant still showed Available.
4. The entity's last_reported timestamp remained frozen.
5. I powered the THOR back on.
6. It automatically reconnected to the OCPP server and the entities were reported again, without reloading the integration.

So automatic reconnection works correctly, but there is currently no reliable indication in Home Assistant that the OCPP connection has been lost.

This is particularly important when using G_MaxCurrent from Home Assistant for dynamic load management.

If the OCPP connection is lost while a vehicle is charging, Home Assistant may still show Charging, but it can no longer reduce the charger's current if the household load increases.

Since the integration already handles OCPP Heartbeat messages, could it expose a binary_sensor with device class connectivity representing the live OCPP connection?

For example:

• on → OCPP/WebSocket connection is alive and heartbeats are being received
• off → connection has been lost or heartbeats have timed out

Alternatively, exposing a last_heartbeat sensor, or marking the charger as Unavailable after a configurable number of missed heartbeats / connection timeout, would also solve the problem.

Ideally, the connectivity state should be based on the actual OCPP heartbeat/WebSocket connection, rather than regular entity updates or MeterValues, so it also works while the charger is idle.

This would allow Home Assistant automations to implement a safety check such as:

Charging + OCPP Connectivity = off → notify that dynamic load management is no longer available.

Thanks for maintaining this integration.

[felixhix]

Hi @dequinho,
thanks for reporting this. This has now been addressed on the development branch as part of PR #44.
Instead of adding a separate connectivity binary sensor, the integration now tracks inbound OCPP activity independently from the charger-reported status. If no OCPP message is received for 180 seconds, the connection is considered stale, the local WebSocket is closed, and the existing Status entity becomes unavailable.
The last charger-reported status is still retained in the diagnostics, together with the connection time, last message, and last heartbeat timestamps.
The main implementation is in commit 7fe69a2, with the connection/status separation completed in beb6569.
This is planned for the upcoming v1.6.0 release.