Debug EV charging in the lab before finding it in the desert
Take the guesswork out of EV charging interoperability with a suite of charge control emulators.
PUBLISHED
The most adrenaline-inducing part of owning an electric vehicle is not acceleration.
What gets your heart racing more? A short sprint onto the highway or plugging into a remote desert fast charger, with single digit battery charge wondering if it is going to charge?
Think of a failed protocol handshake stranding you in Death Valley’s scorching heat on a field trip.
Death Valley in California is one of the hottest places on Earth, an edge case by definition. It is home to some of the most unique species thriving in the most unique conditions like the Devils Hole pupfish, an endangered fish that can survive in a single geothermal pool, in water that would kill most fish. With air temperatures frequently hitting highs of 50°C (122°F) and ground temperatures near 90°C (194°F), Furnace Creek in Death Valley is also a hot spot for testing vehicle edge cases. Just like mother nature figured out how to make life work in the harshest edge cases on the continent, your charge controller needs to do the same.
Unfortunately, sometimes that’s not the case.
A few years ago, a vehicle validation team was left stranded in Death Valley, on their hunt for edge cases on the ground. They were on a tight schedule to keep running through their design validation plan (DVP). All it took was a failed protocol handshake at a Combined Charging System (CCS) station in the middle of nowhere.
The nearest fast chargers were two off-brand units miles away, maxing at 50 kW, with one perpetually out of service. The other threw a generic charge fault and refused to go beyond the initial handshake. There was no protocol-level visibility or a way to tell whether the problem is the station’s firmware, the vehicle’s charge controller, or some subtle disagreement in the CCS message sequencing that neither side is logging.
At 8% state of charge, the team was left anticipating whether the charger at the station would talk to the vehicle. All because of a protocol mismatch nobody caught before the vehicles left
Testing interoperability before the run
If the only working station fails to communicate with your vehicle, sometimes the result is being stuck in the desert with no debug tools, no quick fixes, and just a team wasting days on slow Level 2 charging. More and more charging stalls are being installed with higher power and better reliability, but it does not entirely take the edge off.
Will it really charge?
The industry standardizes to the best of its ability, but every implementation leaves room for interpretation and without protocol-level visibility, developers are left guessing and checking against oscilloscope traces.
As a proud long-standing member of the CharIN Organization, we attend interoperability testing events popularly known as Testivals. including the one hosted on our site in 2025. It helps ensure our EU-engineered solutions we offer you meet all industry standards and validate real-world edge cases for premium reliability. Charge controllers are not the place to cut corners, especially when it could make or break your product.
A decade of experience developing high-power density fast charger components has taught us the swiftest path to interoperability is to emulate against your setup on the bench first, then go to Testival to catch the edge cases. We hope to see you there.
Lost in Translation
The current CCS infrastructure runs over power line communication (PLC) on the control pilot (CP) wire and has its own signal integrity requirements to even function. The underlying protocol needs precise timing, synchronization, and certificate exchanges before the first electron ever even flows.
Product development timelines are always demanding. Seasonal weather windows won’t wait for prototype delays, and industry interoperability events such as Testival tend to run on fixed schedules.
Don’t get stuck trickle charging. To avoid unnecessary setbacks, simulate the other side of the communication protocol on your bench first using real hardware.
Hardware in the Loop
At ADVANTICS, we acknowledge that interoperability is never a gamble OEMs and end-users want to take.
Our charge control emulators recreate hardware signals for any CCS, NACS, or MCS combination from either the vehicle or station side with full protocol transparency for debugging bring-up, sequencing, and message exchanges. Think of it as a mini hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulator for your bench.
Plug in and open a web browser for full visibility in all system signals, interactions, and sequencing. Simple analog controls make it easy to simulate connections and disconnection sequences. Watch here a preview of our emulator’s charging session web user interface.
What We Offer:
A suite of emulators for rapid EV charging integration.
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Communication Emulators — Available Now
Simulate CCS, NACS, MCS protocols from vehicle or station side. Full protocol transparency for debugging bring-up, sequencing, and message exchanges with no power stage required.
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Powered Emulators — Coming Soon
Bidirectional high-voltage power stages delivering up to 10 kW. It can enable full charge session emulation — source and sink — in a controlled lab environment. Contact us for more information on availability.
Our emulator unit costs about the same as a single month of third-party equipment rental at an interoperability testing event. The difference is, this time it is yours to keep.
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Find out more about our suite of emulators: https://advantics.fr/products/emulators