A charging controller is selected once and lived with for the life of the product. Fifteen questions decide whether the one on the table fits, and they fall into four groups: what the board has to do to keep people safe, what it has to say to the outside world, what the target market obliges it to do, and what the commercial terms do to the schedule. Everything else — enclosure, cable, branding, tariff design — can be changed later at bounded cost. These cannot.
This page is written to be pasted into a requirement document and edited. Where a question has a bad answer as well as a good one, the bad answer is stated too, because in practice that is the more useful half.
These act locally in milliseconds. No management system, firmware release or backend can add them to a station that was not built with them.
Each of these has a page of its own on this site, because each is regularly specified at a level of detail that cannot be enforced.
The reason this sits in a technical checklist is that it changes technical decisions. A first-year forecast below the minimum order quantity means the right answer is a standard board with the differentiation moved into firmware and enclosure, not a custom board bought in a quantity nobody needs.
Ready is not a defined term and carries no obligation. The checkable version of the same answer names the protocol version, the firmware version and the hardware revision it applies to. If the honest answer is that reaching the version needs a different controller, that is fine — but it has to arrive before the purchase order, not after the first integration test.
Certificates are issued against a named implementation, product or version, and the bodies that issue them publish what they have issued. A statement at company level cannot be checked and therefore cannot be relied on in a tender. Ask which body, which scheme, which product, and where the entry is.
It does not, and no agreement makes it so. Component-level conformity is evidence towards the finished product's file; it is not a substitute for it. A supplier who offers to transfer CE responsibility for a station they do not place on the market is describing something that does not exist in the legislation.
A supplier who has never said no has not yet been asked a hard question, or is answering commercially rather than technically. The useful supplier conversation is the one where a requirement gets pushed back on with a reason. That exchange is also the cheapest test available of whether the engineering team behind the quotation exists.
Our charging platform runs OCPP 1.6 in large-scale commercial operation, with OCPP 2.0.1 support in final development — first delivery scheduled for December 2026. We hold no Open Charge Alliance certificate for either version. Implementing a protocol and holding a third-party certificate for it are two different things, and only the first applies to us today.
CE marking held at board level does not transfer to a finished charging station, and we do not offer it as though it did. Where we have supported customers through certification projects, that is a record of project work, not a transferable certificate.
We do not answer requirement questions at the version level when the honest answer is at the functional-block level, and we will say which parts of a requirement a proposed board cannot reach. A checklist is only useful if the answers to it can be relied on.
The behaviour when the backend link is down. Most requirement documents describe what the station does while connected and say nothing about the state it falls back to. That silence is expensive, because an obligation that has to be guaranteed — a grid operator's current limit, a site connection limit, a tariff schedule — is issued by the backend but executed by the controller, and it matters precisely when the link has failed. State the fallback current, how long the last valid limit is retained, and what happens to a transaction already running.
Requirements, with the product named only as a reference design. Naming a product transfers the specification work to the supplier's marketing page and leaves nothing to hold anyone to when a component is substituted. A requirement list survives revisions, second-sourcing and end-of-life on a part, all of which will happen inside a normal product lifetime.
The party that places the finished product on the EU market under its own name or trademark. Under the Blue Guide (2022/C 247/01) that party carries the manufacturer's obligations, including CE marking and the declaration of conformity for the finished station. A CE marking held at board level does not transfer to the assembled product, and no supplier can transfer it by agreement.
Before the controller is selected. The Open Charge Alliance states that OCPP 1.6 and OCPP 2.0.1 are not compatible, so the version is a property of the station rather than a setting, and the newer version's device model, variable store and security features consume flash and RAM that a board sized for 1.6 may not have. Fixing it late means either a controller change or a feature that quietly does not appear.
Which protective device provides which function, and where it physically sits. An EV charging circuit can produce smooth DC residual current, so the requirement has to state whether DC fault detection is integrated in the station or expected from an external Type B device in the installation. Getting this wrong does not usually show up in testing; it shows up as an argument about scope when the installer opens the enclosure.
No, and confusing the two is a common scheduling error. For eectec, a standard board in an existing configuration ships on a 45-day lead time, while a customised AC design is a three-month development cycle and a DC design is four months before series delivery starts. A project plan should carry both numbers separately, because the development cycle runs once and the lead time runs every time.
At eectec, 500 units for AC controller boards and 100 units for DC controllers, with 300 units as the standard minimum and 1,000 units where the design is customised. These figures belong in the specification stage rather than the negotiation stage, because a minimum order quantity that does not match the first-year forecast changes which engagement model makes sense, not just the price.
The legislation and the standards are the authority; this page is a checklist for reading them against a product. Where a requirement matters commercially, it should be written against the source document rather than against any vendor's summary, including this one.
Send it as it stands, including the parts that are still open. We will answer each line with what a proposed board reaches today, what would need development, and what we cannot claim.