UCD Formula Student 2026: Designing Our Own Battery Management System

Returning to Silverstone

UCD Formula Student, the University College Dublin Formula Student team, returns to Formula Student UK at Silverstone this July with our 2026 car. Our team of students from across engineering, computer science and business degrees has spent the last year designing and building the car.

Last season was our most successful to date. We took third place in the Business Plan Presentation event, earned three scrutineering stickers, and finished 28th in the FS class. We are aiming to build on that result this year.

A custom Battery Management System

The biggest change to this year’s powertrain is that we have designed and built our own Battery Management System. Previous cars used an off-the-shelf BMS. This year we wanted to do it ourselves.

The system is built around a master board running an STM32F303 microcontroller, paired with slave segment boards distributed through the accumulator. Each slave carries two Analog Devices LTC6812 monitor chips, which handle cell voltage measurement and temperature monitoring across the cell modules. The slaves communicate back to the master over an isoSPI daisy chain, and the master exposes the data to the rest of the car over CAN.

Working with Eurocircuits

Eurocircuits manufactured and assembled every board in the BMS family: the master, the slaves and a dedicated voltage measurement board. They also produced revised versions of our pre-charge, shutdown, BSPD, PDU and breakout boards. Each slave board has sixty-seven components placed, with the LTC6812 monitors supplied directly by our team.

Working with Eurocircuits is what makes a project like this realistic for a student team. The PCB Proto service covered our smaller boards and the STANDARD pool handled the higher-volume slaves, which kept the project within budget while still giving us fully assembled hardware back, ready to fit to the car.

Looking ahead to FSUK 2026

This is one of the most involved electronics projects the team has taken on, and Eurocircuits’ continued sponsorship is what has made it possible. We are very grateful for their support, and looking forward to running the car at Silverstone in July.

For more information please visit the UCD Formula Student website.