charger

What This Skill Does

The charger skill is a specialized OpenClaw tool designed to interface with Google Places to monitor Electric Vehicle (EV) charging station availability in real-time. By leveraging the Google Places EV charge data, this tool provides a robust solution for tracking specific stations, searching for nearby charging options, and receiving automated notifications when a charger becomes vacant. It utilizes a combination of a Node.js CLI tool for data retrieval and a shell-based notification system to manage state and minimize alert fatigue.

Installation

To install this skill, use the command: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/borahm/charger.

Ensure you have Node.js 18+ installed on your system. You must obtain a Google Places API key and configure it in your environment variables, ideally located at ~/.clawdbot/.env. After placing the CLI binary in your path (typically ~/clawd/bin/), you can manage your favorites by running charger favorites add <name> --place-id <id>. For automated alerts, the scripts/charger-notify.sh utility tracks the state of specific chargers in ~/.cache/charger-notify/ and should be triggered via a crontab schedule.

Use Cases

This skill is perfect for EV owners who frequently use public charging infrastructure. Common use cases include: 1) Monitoring a home-vicinity charger to see when it opens up after work hours. 2) Searching for high-speed chargers while on a road trip using the nearby command. 3) Reducing the need for manual checking by setting up background cron tasks that ping your notification service (like Telegram) only when a charger transitions from occupied to available.

Example Prompts

1. "OpenClaw, check the availability of my home charger and let me know if it's free now."
2. "Find me the nearest EV charging stations within 2 kilometers of my current location."
3. "Set up a recurring check for the Liniengasse charging station every 10 minutes and notify me on Telegram only when it becomes available."

Tips & Limitations

To ensure optimal performance, keep your GOOGLE_PLACES_API_KEY secure and restricted to necessary APIs. Note that this tool relies on third-party data provided by Google; therefore, accuracy is dependent on real-time reporting from the charging providers themselves. Use the nearby command carefully with radius constraints to avoid hitting Google Places API rate limits or incurring unnecessary costs. If a charger is offline or reported as 'OOS', the notification system will treat it as unavailable, preventing you from being misled into visiting a broken station.