E-ION
Every cell thinks for itself
A distributed Battery Management System forged on Formula Student circuits, where each cell module runs its own State-of-Health model and balances the pack chemically, extending service life by 30%.
Year
2024
Client
Italian automotive consortium (confidential)
Role
System architecture, embedded firmware, AI modelling
Duration
10 months
Team
5 embedded engineers, 1 ML engineer, 1 hardware designer
Category
Embedded Engineering / Electric Vehicles
// The context
The high-performance EV battery market is at an inflection point: centralised BMS designs treat the pack as a monolith, masking per-cell chemical drift until damage is already done. Italian Formula Student teams have spent years amassing high-density telemetry, an asset that rarely travels beyond the paddock. In 2024, an industrial consortium saw in that raw data the raw material to redesign battery intelligence from the ground up.
// The challenge
The real difficulty was not the AI model. It was making it run on low-cost, low-power microcontrollers in hard real time without compromising IEC 61508 functional safety. Distributing intelligence across dozens of modules meant rethinking the communication topology and maintaining global pack coherence with no omniscient central node. Chemical balancing demanded a physics-empirical hybrid that no off-the-shelf ML framework was equipped to host.
// What made it special
Inference in 48 kB
The 8-bit quantised SoH model runs on an STM32F4 in under 3 ms per cycle, bare-metal, adding less than 8 mW to the cell module's power budget.
Active chemical balancing
The distributed MPC acts on current and temperature to minimise SEI layer growth, extending pack life by 30% in accelerated ageing tests.
Race data, real product
14 months of telemetry, over 900 GB, supplied thermal and current-load distributions impossible to replicate in a lab, making the model genuinely robust.
SIL 2 functional safety
The full firmware chain was developed with static analysis, automated mutation testing, and 97% MC/DC coverage, meeting SIL 2 requirements.
// Results
+30%
Pack life extension
<3 ms
SoH inference latency
48 kB
Firmware footprint
97%
MC/DC coverage
900+ GB
Telemetry processed
96
Cells in pilot pack
// The process
Discovery & data
Audit of the Formula Student telemetry archive and selection of the distributed communication topology.
Modelling & validation
SoH model training, NMC digital twin in Simulink, and hardware-in-the-loop validation on a real cell test bench.
Firmware & hardware
Firmware in Rust/C with flash optimisation, cell module PCB design in Altium, and thermal qualification from -20 °C to +70 °C.
Integration & testing
96-cell pack integration, accelerated ageing campaign, independent SIL 2 audit, and certifiable documentation.
"Zeklar took an idea that existed only on paper and brought it to production, with the systems-engineering rigour we expected from a top-tier partner, and a pace we didn't think was possible from anyone."
// The impact
E-ION proved that cell-level distributed intelligence is industrially viable without sacrificing certifiability: the consortium launched a 500-unit pre-series programme. The architecture is now the subject of two European patent applications filed jointly with the client.