Formula Electric Belgium – Green Innovations meets Performance

“Green Innovation meets Performance”

This quote sums up everything we do and strive for at Formula Electric Belgium. Although one thing we sometimes lose sight of, is the focus on the reliability of our car, which is the main goal of this year’s race car!

Those who have been following Formula Electric Belgium for a while know that we want to become the first Belgian team with an autonomous car and this goal is close to becoming a reality. This year’s car will serve a double purpose; winning podium places in this summer’s competitions and becoming the reliable foundation of our driverless car department.

Saying all this now, at the beginning of our design season is easy, but we also know this will be one of the biggest challenges yet as electronics is concerned. Due to the widespread resource shortage we have to redesign close to every PCB on our car, to assist us in our prototyping and development we can always depend on Eurocircuits’ fast and high-quality PCB production and this is why we are proud to have Eurocircuits as one of our oldest partners!

As for what we are currently working on:

• Our current microcontrollers weren’t available anymore, so we are using this forced redesign to update them to a faster, CAN-FD capable microcontroller on our sensor nodes, dashboard, and battery management system.
• As with our microcontrollers, our cell balancing and monitoring chips for our battery module aren’t available anymore, so we are upgrading them to the next generation.
• We are upgrading our magnetic pedal sensor chip to one with a smaller range to get a greater resolution.
• Last year we developed an ECU which is smaller, lighter and faster than our current solution which we will implement in our new car!

As you can see a lot of work for a team of only 3, fresh out of school, electronic engineers.