Technical Onboarding Guide

This guide walks you through the FlexHome․Energy onboarding workflow, covering everything from initial contact through to training. Each phase below describes the activities carried out by you (the customer) and by the FlexHome․Energy team.

Initial Contact

1. The customer and the FlexHome․Energy sales team collect information about the customer's use case. This is done via direct contact and/or by filling out the questionnaire at flexhome.energy/formular.
2. The FlexHome․Energy sales team kicks off the evaluation phase by inviting technical staff from both the customer and FlexHome․Energy.

Evaluation

The engineering teams of the customer and FlexHome․Energy specify the integration details in an engineering meeting.

Integration Details Reviewed

Topic	Description
Possible integration techniques	Which interfaces does the energy provider support for controlling the batteries and obtaining the metering information? Standard protocol, FlexHome․Energy HTTP interface, or FlexHome․Energy SDK.
Programming language	The programming language of the platform determines the programming language for which FlexHome․Energy needs to provide an SDK.
Operating system	Which operating system is the energy provider running on?

Integration Techniques and Development Tools

Topic	Description
API technology	The IoT platform description.
FlexCloud SDK	The software development kit for the programming language and operating system of the customer.
FlexCloud Development client	The development client that provides an HTTP interface to immediately start using the platform.
Documentation	The onboarding documentation, consisting of a description of the first steps.

After the meeting:

1. The FlexHome․Energy engineering team compiles a list of deliverables to be provided to the customer for controlling the batteries via FlexCloud.
2. FlexHome․Energy kicks off the setup phase internally.

Setup

The setup phase consists of two parallel streams: FlexCloud setup and hardware setup.

FlexCloud Setup

The FlexHome․Energy cloud team:

1. Creates virtual devices.
   • Creates communication certificates.
2. Provides device identifiers (SKI) to the hardware team.
3. Updates each virtual device with information provided by the hardware team.
   • Sets the battery serial number per device.
   • Sets the LTE number per device.
4. Creates the customer account.
   • Creates a customer-specific group in FlexCloud.
   • Creates a customer-specific user in FlexCloud.
5. Assigns the devices to the customer-specific group for operation.
6. Provides device information to the ERP team:
   • Identifiers
   • Customer information

Hardware Setup

The FlexHome․Energy hardware team:

1. Obtains SIM(s) for LTE communication from the communication network provider (A1).
2. Obtains the device identifiers (SKI) from the cloud team.
3. Assigns a SIM per device and provides the device serial number along with the LTE number to the cloud team.
4. Obtains the RAPID communication hardware (Teltonika).
5. Registers the devices on the RAPID server.
6. Provides device information to the ERP team:
   • Battery addresses

Delivery

Software Delivery

The FlexHome․Energy cloud team provides the customer's engineering team with:

1. The API credentials.
2. The development client for:
   • Windows
   • Linux
   • macOS
3. The SDK, depending on the integration technique chosen during evaluation.
4. The quick start guide.

Hardware Delivery

The FlexHome․Energy hardware team ships the batteries to the customer.

Training

The FlexHome․Energy cloud engineering team and the customer's engineering team conduct a meeting to walk through the first steps.

Step 1 — Preparation

The customer's engineering team:

• Downloads the development client.
• Downloads the quick start guide.

Step 2 — First Requests

The customer's engineering team:

• Runs the development client.
• Executes the following requests:
  • BatteryStateRequest
  • BatteryControlRequest
  • BatteryControlModifyRequest

Next Steps

For details on running these requests, see the FlexConnect API User Guide — First Steps.