Pion Smart Charger

Help! The app is the opposite of intuitive. You “log in”, but it is never clear what you need to be connected to. You need si-di network for the internet, but then the charger itself creates a wi-fi network that you need to be connected to. Then, the homepage announces that there is “no connection” , but this is via an odd icon that you have to navigate to the help section to find an explanation of what it means, but then it still isn’t clear what is not connected?”: your home wi-fi, or the charger’s? To confuse matters further, it can take several minutes for the app, the charger (who knows which?!) to “do” what you asked it to do, so if you have been swiping back and forth between the app’s various pages, trying to figure out which setting you maybe don’t have setup correctly, well, you may never find out. There is a perplexing scheduling window, but once you have created a schedule for a particular day, there is no way to edit it. If you create a new “schedule” that overlaps with an existing schedule, you can’t proceed. The app doesn’t let you edit, it doesn’t let you delete, and it doesn’t tell you how you have overlapped an existing schedule. It is my impression that I can’t get the charger to work without having a schedule, but that is not mentioned anywhere, and there really needs to be an override that allows you to plug the charger in and start charging right away. Oh, and it doesn’t seem like you can do anything without the app. The charger itself has no inputs, and only a colored light to communicate status.

This app is barely functional. It seems to be able to connect to the charger, but that’s about it. It’s unable to set a network for the device to connect to and the device takes several minutes to setup the ad hoc network. The app also disallows any password with a space in it, which means if your wifi password has a space, it won’t even accept the config (however, it doesn’t seem to work with a basic ssid/password combo anyway) There doesn’t appear to be any way to factory reset the device either, so once it’s in a bad state, there’s no fixing it. Support isn’t very helpful either - they just reply with links to the manual which has simple instructions but no troubleshooting steps for when one of the steps doesn’t go as planned.