Formula Electric Belgium – The Apollo

After a year of hard work, the Formula Electric Belgium team built a new racecar named Apollo, with some new and exciting upgrades. One of the biggest and most exciting upgrades is the ECU, which now uses a Digi ConnectCore 8X computer. Thanks to this new ECU we can now use more complex programs and algorithms, and we have smoother communication. This is one of the upgrades that was done with the goal of going driverless in 2023-2024. The dashboard was however not fully functional yet as some changes still need to be made to the code.

The Semi Active Suspension or SAS was also changed. The PID controller was upgraded and the algorithms were finetuned, allowing for smoother and faster cornering by adapting the suspension in a fraction of a second.

Another upgrade we made this year is the battery, a new Accumulator Management System (or AMS) was designed as well as a change to the battery slaves, where a separate logic and power stage was implemented. Thanks to this design decision the PCB could be simplified which allows for easier debugging and repairing of the modules.

With these upgrades we went to three different competitions. The first competition of the year was FSN where some rule violations and technical difficulties held us back. But thanks to a strong static event we still placed 20^th.
With these technical difficulties solved, the team went to FS East where we got our best ever result in that competition, finishing in a 7^th place finish thanks to a strong endurance and efficiency event and a solid performance in the static events.
Finally we took part in Alpe Adria where we had a few solid performances in both static and dynamic events. Unfortunately our endurance run was forced to end early due to a tire failure.