EV charger test equipment and simulators
Simulators and test benches for chargers, load balancers and energy controllers, built for our own development and available to you: a site simulator that imitates chargers on Modbus and a smart meter on P1, tools to talk to and flash the charge controller, and interoperability tests. As equipment, as a test service, or built for your protocol.
Chargers fail in the field on things a bench never showed: a car that falls asleep during a pause, a meter that sends its telegram a little differently, a bus that answers 10 ms too late. We build the equipment to provoke those cases on the bench, because our own boards, load balancers and firmware have to survive them. The same equipment can test yours.
What we have
| Tool | What it does | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Site simulator | Imitates a complete charging site on one small unit: several charge controllers on the RS485 Modbus bus, with the full register map, states A, B and C, 1- or 3-phase charging, a charge current that follows the limit the controller sets, and energy counters; and a DSMR 5 smart meter on P1 whose load follows the simulated cars. A load balancer can be tested end to end, with no car and no charger | Tested (in use for our own development) |
| Modbus tool | Reads and writes every register of the charge controller from a PC, over RS485 or a TCP gateway | Shipped, open source (GitHub) |
| Firmware flasher | Updates the charge controller’s firmware over its Modbus connection | Shipped (release 2.10.19) |
| EV wake-up test | Three ways to wake a sleeping car (CP interruption, “charger absent”, unplug/replug sequence) with adjustable timing, to find what a given car needs | Shipped, in the charge controller firmware |
| GridShield interoperability | Our GridShield controller and receiver tested against ElaadNL’s implementation in both directions | Tested |
| EV simulator | The car side of IEC 61851: states A to F, PWM duty cycle, PP cable codes, and the reactions of different cars to a charging pause | On request |
What you can use it for
- Load-balancing algorithms. Ten simulated cars that start, stop and change phase on command, against your controller’s limit, without ten cars in a car park.
- Firmware regression. Run the same sessions after every firmware change and compare the register traces.
- Protocol timing. The charge controller expects an answer within 40 ms; we measure where a gateway or a slow master breaks that.
- Smart-meter variants. P1 telegrams with import, export, 1 or 3 phases and edge cases, for a controller that reads them.
- Interoperability. GridShield both ways, Modbus against our register map, Matter devices commissioned into a controller we run.
- End-of-line test. A test station for chargers coming off your assembly line. On request.
Three ways to work with us
- Equipment. A simulator or test bench, built to order and configured for your site sizes and protocols.
- Test service. You send your charger, load balancer or energy controller; we run it on our bench and report what we found, with the traces.
- Engineering. We build a simulator or test tool for your protocol or product, as part of an engagement.
Prices and lead times on request. Contact us with what you want to test.