Not really. Stations and the car are completely opaque as far as all the complexity goes. I don't know any way to dig deeper, even with Tes-LAX/CAN info. I'd say, though, that knowing how CCS negotiates can be helpful to getting a station to work:
- you plug in, regardless of whether you've swiped your card or not, and negotiation starts (as
longasthehandlelatchclicks. The handle latch is all too commonly overlooked. If the latch button doesn't "click" when inserted, it thinks you're holding the button down. If you get the "charging plug not fully inserted" notification on your phone, that's what this means! The latch button is pressed somehow)
- not exactly sure which is true: that the station signals B1 (+12v solid, functional, but not ready) and then begins SLAC (PLC signal-tuning to "get the Ethernet cable plugged in")... or whether it signals B2 (+/-12v PWM with 3-7% PWM duty, meaning "digital communication required") first. Either way, at this point, SLAC takes place in the high frequency RF realm over the existing low-frequency or DC pilot signal.
- after SLAC completes and the car<->vehicle have an established communication channel, they start talking about requirements and who they are. (this includes stuff like kWh-to-full, max charging rate, minutes estimated, etc etc)
- Finally, there's this {{{{LOOOOONG PERIOD}}}} where the car and station will wait for a thing called "contract authentication", as I recall it referred to. This, now, is waiting on you to swipe your card, etc
(The car actually shows when it reaches this phase - on the screen is a little notification saying something like "charging station requires authentication" - and that's how you know digital comms are established and it's just waiting on your card at the station - or at least, that's what the station has told the car).
- After swiping card, the two quickly chat about performing the cable test (station sends high voltage up the cable, but the car's charging relay isn't closed yet), and makes sure it's not shorted anywhere or leaking.
- Next, the car tells the station what voltage to set the cable to (the battery voltage), then when happy, the car's charging relay closes without a spark (since the voltage matches).
- The car tells the station to gogogogogogo and how many amps to pump to reach what target voltage, etc. And they keep chattering back and forth rapidly while it charges; the car telling the station what to do, many times a second.
Most often, it seems to break down at points 2 or 3 above -- the station isn't signaling in a way that the car understands (either the station or the car isn't "listening for" SLAC signals, so one side's saying "hello? hello? hello?" while the other isn't listening -- or the station is internally in a disjointed state where the CCS modem is asleep but the UI is saying it's establishing communication on the screen)... and you end up with this whole routine falling apart. Some stations do stupid things with the CCS process - they worked so hard at implementing the digital side of things, they didn't bother thinking of the analog (PWM) side. Lots of things "just worked" by sheer interoperability compatibility chance, but not actually the way it was intended to work - so it's shipped, it breaks later.
Or sometimes, around step 4, it's actually NOT waiting on that - the station may have been developed to have you swipe your card FIRST, and then it'll just magically, automatically have "contract authentication" passed in hard code. If you plug-first, the SLAC will time-out while waiting to swipe the card. So sometimes (admittedly very rare, and on badly-behaving stations), you'd need to swipe first, plug second. But the overwhelming majority of the time (and the way it's meant to be done), you plug first (so they can start chatting), swipe second (so the chatting & the authentication can occur in parallel), and it should work.
At this point, with holes in the standards, it seems like "every vehicle/station for themselves", and we're just hoping the de-facto standards crystalize sooner than later. But with my experience with that in-development station, it still seems we have a ways to go.
(sorry, a bit of brain vomit there. CCS gives me nightmares.)
So honestly, that may not even be possible!
did they seriously liquid-cool the cable in the car too?
