Eaton's grant US11167655B2 (issued November 9, 2021) is classified under B60L 53/30 (charging stations), B60L 53/16 (connectors/sockets), and the H01R 13 connector-hardware classes (641/665/7175, covering interlocks, shielding, and contact arrangements). That H01R weighting is the tell: this is not a control or protocol patent but a physical-connector patent, and the claimed invention is the status-indication hardware built into the connector body and the way that hardware is mechanically captured.

“A connector is for a charging station. The charging station has a charging box having a signaling mechanism.”— U.S. Patent No. 11,167,655 source

The abstract is terse, but independent claim 1 is dense and almost entirely structural. It recites a connector for a charging station whose charging box has "a signaling mechanism," and inside the connector: "an electrical receptacle," "a housing... comprising a plurality of slots formed in an exterior of the housing," and "an indicating assembly coupled to an interior of said housing, said indicating assembly comprising indicating circuitry, a plurality of light sources disposed in a central region of the interior of the housing, and a plurality of light pipes, each of the light pipes corresponding to and coupled to one of the light sources." The light-pipe architecture is the functional core: the LEDs sit centrally inside the connector, and each one's light is carried by a dedicated pipe out to a slot in the housing exterior. That lets a user read charging status off the connector in hand rather than off a distant station display.

Claim 1 then specifies the signaling logic in hardware terms: "the signaling mechanism is structured to provide a charging status signal corresponding to a selected one of a plurality of charging status states," each light source "corresponds to one of the plurality of charging status states," and "the indicating circuitry is structured to determine the selected one... and to selectively activate the light source which corresponds" to it. So the connector decodes a status signal coming from the charging box and lights exactly the matching indicator — a one-of-N status display embedded in the plug.

What makes this a granted B2 rather than an obvious LED-in-a-plug is the long mechanical-capture limitation that closes claim 1. The housing comprises "a first housing member and a second housing member coupled to one another," each running "between a first end coupled to the electrical receptacle and a second end," each with "an opening extending from the first end to the second end," and the two members "are structured to prevent the indicating assembly from moving side to side when coupled to one another such that the opening of the first housing member is aligned with the opening of the second housing member." The clincher: "all components that couple the indicating assembly to the interior of the housing are formed within the interior of either of the first housing member or second housing member such that no portion of said components can be removed... without changing the structure of the first housing member or second housing member." That is a tamper-resistant, fastener-free capture — the indicating assembly is held by the two clamshell halves themselves, with no separable mounting hardware. In a connector that gets yanked, dropped, and weathered, that integral capture is a real durability and serviceability claim, and it is the limitation most likely doing the work of distinguishing over prior status-light connectors.

The dependents map the indicator scheme onto charging semantics. Claim 2 makes each light source "energized independently of every other light source"; claim 4 specifies the light sources are LEDs; claim 3, 7, and 8 tie the indicating circuitry to a printed circuit board captured in grooves or internal supports inside the housing — again reinforcing the integral, fastener-free build. Claims 5 and 6 assign meanings to the lights: a first source for "a charging state," a second for "an error state," and a third for "a power ready state." That three-state vocabulary (ready / charging / error) is the practical user-facing payload.

Claim 9 re-casts the whole thing as the charging station including the connector, and claim 11 as a method of charging in which the connector "send[s] a charging status signal... to said indicating circuitry" and "selectively activat[es] the light source which corresponds to the selected one." Claim 12's "illuminating no more than one light source in response to the charging status signal" enforces the mutually-exclusive one-of-N display, and claim 14 has the power-ready light illuminate before coupling — a sequence detail that matters for user expectation.

The classification weighting explains why the integral-capture limitation, not the indicator concept, is likely the patentable heart. B60L 53/30 and B60L 53/16 place the patent at the charging-station-and-connector level, but the bulk of claim 1's text lives in H01R 13 territory — connector housings, contact and indicator arrangements, retention. Status LEDs on charging equipment were hardly new by 2021, so an examiner would have looked to the specific mechanical recitations to find allowable subject matter, and claim 1 supplies them in quantity: the central LED placement, the per-LED light pipes routed to exterior slots, the two-member housing whose halves themselves prevent the indicating assembly from shifting, and the closing requirement that no coupling component can be removed "without changing the structure" of a housing member. That last clause is effectively a tamper- and service-resistance limitation — the indicator is captive by geometry, not fasteners. For a connector that lives outdoors and gets handled roughly, captive-by-geometry assembly is a durability claim with real field value, and it is narrow enough to distinguish over the broad universe of "lighted plug" prior art. The PCB-in-grooves recitations of claims 3, 7, and 8 reinforce the same fastener-free philosophy down to the circuit board.

The verdict: enabling, examined, and squarely a hardware claim. The novelty is not "a light on a plug" but the central-LED/light-pipe-to-exterior-slot indicator combined with the two-member integral capture that holds the indicating assembly with no removable fasteners. Report it as a connector-mechanical-and-indication patent whose moat is that integral-capture limitation plus the light-pipe routing, and read the ready/charging/error states as the claimed user semantics, not as the inventive heart.