University Racing Eindhoven – The URE17

About University Racing Eindhoven

University Racing Eindhoven (URE) is a student team from Eindhoven University of Technology. The team was founded in 2003. With a group of about 70 students, we participate in the Formula Student competition, which is the biggest design competition for students all over the world. The goal of the team is to educate the engineers of the future and build a fully electric and autonomous race vehicle.

This past year, we have been hard at work designing the URE17. The aim for the URE17 is to reduce weight and increase the reliability of the last car. The URE17 also focusses a lot at driverless integration, meaning that the systems are incorporated more in the car.

Due to the issues, we have had last year with certain PCB designs, we decided to use Eurocircuits rapid prototyping to validate PCBs in a matter of a few days! This showed issues quickly, instead of waiting for longer periods of time and insured that the design is functional before ordering bigger batches.

Satellites

One of the PCBs that is part of the accumulator are the Satellites, which are responsible for measuring the cell voltages of all individual cells and sending them together with the cell temperatures to our Battery Management System (BMS) via CAN communication. The satellites are placed on top of the Interconnection Boards, which are put on top of the cell stacks in the accumulator. This is the PCB where we had most issues with last year, that’s why we decided to make some prototypes as mentioned above. Thanks to this validation method our first big batch of satellites had no faults at all.

In the image above the prototype board is showcased which we used for testing purposes.

What’s next

Currently we’re hard at work to wrap up the URE17 and make it ready for the racing season! All PCBs designs are being wrapped up to be placed in the car at the end of May to ensure the car is driving at the beginning of June. This year we will be competing in Formula Student Netherlands, Formula Student East, and Formula Student Germany.