Formula Electric Belgium in 2023-2024

Formula Electric Belgium in 2023-2024:

Just like every year, new team members come and old team members go.
The 2023 season was a success with a nice 7^th place in FS East and performance improvements, like an improved Semi-Active-Suspension and an improved aerodynamics package.

This year the new team members are already hard at work with their own goals in mind. One of the biggest goals for the 2024 season of the Formula Electric Belgium team is to successfully compete in a driverless competition, and be competitive in more races. In order to achieve this several systems need to implemented.

These are both software and hardware related. First off, several algorithms need to be written and optimized, like a cone-detection algorithm, an algorithm to find the optimal racing lines and much much more.

Next up there is the hardware, in which Eurocircuits plays an important role. In order to be able to run the car in a driverless mode several PCBs need to be adapted to implement safety features.
Finally the steering motor also needs to be driven. To quickly develop and test these safety critical systems Eurocircuits is the ideal partner, thanks to their fast  production and delivery.

Of course getting the car to drive driverless isn’t the only goal. We also want to make the car more reliable and easier to debug. This way we can be competitive in more races. One example of how we implemented this was to redesign the Semi-Active-Suspension PCBs. By simplifying the design less wires need to be ran through the car and debugging the PCBs is faster.

Another improvement we made this year is to the battery. Last year the Battery Management System was redesigned to work with two separate PCBs, a logic and power stage, allowing for easier debugging and repairing. This year some small upgrades were made to the layout of the battery cells on these PCBs and the tracing of the voltage sensors allowing for a more accurate reading of the different cell voltages. Finally a safety feature was added to automatically ground the power and logic PCBs before connecting them. These prototypes were than tested using resistors to mimic the cells normally used.