Introduction
The OCPP Emulator is a virtual EV charger. It speaks the same protocols a real charging station speaks — OCPP 1.6, OCPP 2.0.1, and OCPI for roaming — so you can develop and test your Charge Point Management System (CPMS) without buying, wiring, or shipping hardware.
Why simulate?
Physical chargers are slow and expensive to test against. A single device can
only be in one state at a time, firmware varies by vendor, and reproducing an
edge case — a dropped WebSocket mid-transaction, a malformed MeterValues, a
boot during an active reservation — is painful on real hardware.
The emulator makes those scenarios deterministic and repeatable:
- Spin up many chargers at once to load-test your backend.
- Replay exact message sequences to reproduce a production bug.
- Inject failures — disconnects, timeouts, invalid payloads — on demand.
When to use it
| Situation | Use the emulator? |
|---|---|
| Building or validating a CPMS | Yes |
| Load-testing backend concurrency | Yes |
| Reproducing a protocol edge case | Yes |
| Certifying physical charger firmware | Use real hardware |
Next steps
Head to the Quickstart to connect your first simulated charger.