Pushing current into a car is the easy claim; a charge point is really a safety system, a billing meter and a connected device wearing one enclosure. The controller has to negotiate with the vehicle, protect people from fault currents, meter accurately enough to charge money, and stay manageable from a back office.
An EV charge-point controller sits between the grid and the vehicle. Its visible job is to deliver energy; its real job is to do so safely, to a standard, while measuring what was delivered accurately enough to bill for it and reporting to a management back office.
Each of those is a discipline. Safety means detecting fault and residual currents and disconnecting fast, to standards that do not negotiate. Charging means the control-pilot handshake with the vehicle, done right across many vehicles. Billing means metering to an accuracy that survives audit. Management means a protocol like OCPP and connectivity that stays up in a car park.
So the controller is engineered as the intersection of safety, power, metrology and connectivity, with the safety functions holding priority over everything else.
Stated before any of them had an answer.
Fault and residual-current protection to standard, with fast disconnection, is a hard requirement; the charger is a people-safety device before it is anything else.
The control-pilot negotiation with the car has to work across many vehicles and edge cases, not just the one on the bench.
Energy has to be measured accurately enough to charge money and survive audit, which is a metering-accuracy problem, not a rough count.
Chargers live in basements and car parks where signal is poor, yet must stay manageable and report reliably to the back office.
A charger that only pushes current is a hazard with a plug. The product is the safety, the metrology and the management wrapped around the power — with safety holding priority.
The scope of the work, rather than a capability list.
Rarely the subsystem that sounds difficult.
The safety functions must hold priority and remain provable under every fault; that discipline shapes the whole controller architecture.
The control-pilot handshake works easily with common cars and reveals its difficulty in the edge cases; robustness across the fleet is the real work.
Getting energy metrology accurate and stable enough to charge money and pass audit is a genuine analog and calibration problem.
Chargers sit where signal is worst; keeping them manageable and reporting reliably is a connectivity design, not an afterthought.
Fault protection and safe-state behaviour to standard, provable and prioritised.
A vehicle handshake robust across the fleet, not just the reference vehicle.
Metering accurate and stable enough to charge money and pass audit.
OCPP back-office control over a link that survives the basement.
Customer projects are presented at property, capability, outcome and integration level. Customer names, internal architecture, confidential deliverables and commercial terms are not disclosed. Where a detail would identify a customer it is omitted rather than approximated. More is available under a non-disclosure agreement, within the limits the customer has agreed.
Every item links to its own page.
Edge compute and gateways.
SERVICEBoard design and bring-up.
SERVICEFirmware to application.
SERVICEConverters, PLLs, PMICs.
SOLUTIONMeasuring what is used.
SERVICEFleets, OTA, telemetry.
Delivering power is the smallest part. A charge point is a people-safety device that must detect fault and residual currents and disconnect fast to standard; a metering instrument that measures energy accurately enough to bill and pass audit; and a connected device managed from a back office over a protocol like OCPP. The controller is the intersection of those disciplines, and the safety functions take priority over everything else.
Because the control-pilot negotiation that sets up charging has to work not just with the car on the test bench but across the whole range of vehicles and their edge-case behaviours. Common vehicles are easy; the value and the difficulty are in handling the long tail robustly, so that any car that plugs in charges correctly rather than the charger working for some models and failing others.
Because the energy delivered is what the customer is billed for, and billing has to survive audit. That makes metering a metrology problem — accurate, stable across temperature and time, and calibrated — rather than a rough count of power delivered. An inaccurate meter is not a minor flaw; it undermines the commercial and regulatory basis of the whole charge point.
Written for engineers. Share it with one.
Tell us the specification, the constraint and the deadline. Programmes that cross silicon, radio, embedded and AI are where Faststream is strongest.