FST Lisboa ‘s FST12 Dominates Global Competitions

Eurocircuits FST Lisboa Partnership Article

In the 2022/2023 season, FST Lisboa developed the FST12 prototype, a fully electric vehicle integrating autonomous driving. The team participated in a total of three international competitions: FSPortugal, FSSpain and FSGermany.

FST Lisboa achieved excellent results in the Driverless category, securing 1st place in FSPortugal, 1st place in FSSpain and 3rd place in FSGermany. As for the EV category, the team claimed 1st place in FSPortugal, 2nd place in FSSpain and 9th place in FSGermany.

These results reflect not only the team’s progress over the years, but above all, its commitment to innovation and its ambition, and all that resulted in the most reliable car in the team history, and EuroCircuits took a major role in reaching this status as the sole manufacturer of circuit boards for the FST12.

Here is an example of a PCB the FST electronics team developed in the FST12 season with the support of Eurocircuits:

RPi Sidekick

Powerful and compact computers like the Raspberry Pi provide us with the platform to run more heavy-duty software. Yet, it does not have the capabilities to communicate with the rest of our car modules, since we use CAN as the main communication protocol.  For that we designed a Raspberry Pi shield that enables us to receive and send CAN data from our Raspberry Pi module

For that we need to convert SPI to CAN. This PCB does just that. The result was an ultra dense packaging, not compromising the footprint of the main module.

The MCU that powers the RPi sidekick is a 16-bit, 1 core, Microchip’s MCU from the dsPIC33EP series, which is more than enough to manage the tasks this PCB is designed for.

In the back of the PCB we can find our SPI to S2C conversion channels, where each channel features one SPI Interface CAN Controller, one CANbus transceiver, and the peripherals required for these IC’s. The RPi Sidekick has the capacity of up to four CAN lines.

Besides the SPI/CAN interface, this PCB also features four analog channels which can become handy at any point.

It also has the capability to power the RPi, which contributes to a denser packaging since we don’t need to power it up via USB. For that the PCB features a 5V DCDC that is able to provide up to 25W.

Ever since we partnered with Eurocircuits, PCB modules such as this one have been ultra reliable through the season, in such a harsh environment as a racecar, proving that it has a superior manufacturing quality. This partnership aslo allowed us to use more dense designs, resulting PCBs footprint reduction of up to 60% compared to the previous prototypes.

Thanks to Eurocircuits both of our design and manufacturing seasons have never been remotely compromised, even when there is the need to iterate a design multiple times, since Eurocircuits is able to provide an outstanding lead time to its customers.

Having the most electrically reliable car the team has ever had, our focus next year is to maintain 90% of our electronics architecture as it is and invest more in sensors and sensor data. For that, we count on once again with Eurocircuits to achieve once again a very reliable and robust car when it comes to electronics.