How your charger detects your car

This video walks through how the charger knows when your EV is plugged in, and how it figures out whether it can start charging.

I’ve built my own firmware for this and dealt directly with the J1772 (Type 1), Type 2, and IEC 61851 specification. It is super simple, especially compared to rapid chargers. Two pins, one waveform, that is all there is to it.

I will walk you through the wiring diagram on both the charger and car side in this video. We will look at the ControlPilot (CP) and ProximityPilot (PP) pins.

This video is part of the charging series, if you care about AC slow charging, you probably want to check out other charging content I made where I go over different topics.

Check out the full overview on how ac charging works (another video!)

After watching you will know

  • What AC charging is.
  • What the single PWM Waveform looks like and how it encodes the available current in the duty cycle
  • Which pins in a Type 2 J1772 plug check if the car is present