The foxBMS 2 Documentation

Welcome to the foxBMS 2 documentation. foxBMS 2 is the modular and open source Battery Management System (BMS) development platform from Fraunhofer IISB. This is the second generation of foxBMS. Its is a free, open and flexible development environment to design beyond state-of-the-art complex battery management systems.

Note

The present version of the foxBMS 2 documentation is 1.7.0. It is available in HTML. More detailed information on the version history can be found in the Releases section. This documentation was generated on 2024-08-09 15:41:58.

Warning

The foxBMS 2 hardware and software is under permanent development. The free and open research and development platform foxBMS 2 as presented in the documentation hereafter is not provided to be used without any adaptions (e.g., to fulfill mandatory regulations) in consumer products, electric vehicles, production environments or any similar usages: it is only intended to be used by skilled professionals trained in designing battery system prototypes.

The documentation is divided in the following parts:

  1. General Information

  2. Introduction

  3. Getting Started

  4. Software Documentation

  5. Hardware Documentation

  6. System Documentation

  7. Tools Documentation

  8. Developer Manual

In the first part of the documentation, general information about foxBMS 2 can be found (General Information):

  • Information about the versions and the related release notes of foxBMS 2

  • Licenses of the hardware, software and documentation of foxBMS 2

  • Motivation behind the foxBMS 2 initiative

  • Technology roadmap of the upcoming hardware and software components

  • Team involved in the development of foxBMS 2

The second parts gives an overview about battery systems and their design in general (Introduction):

  • Abbreviations and naming conventions used in the documentation

  • Overview of the platform

  • Use case on which the documentation is based

The third part of the documentation (Getting Started) acts as a guide through the setup of the foxBMS 2 development environment:

  • How to install the required software

  • How to set a workspace to use the sources

To work on the software, the Software Documentation presents the structure of the software, how the basic tasks are running and how to call user-defined functions. Further, a how-to is provided in order to answer the most common questions. A detailed description of the embedded software is found in the Doxygen documentation.

Next, the Hardware Documentation gives the details needed to understand the hardware platform developed for foxBMS 2.

The System Documentation provides information on the integration of foxBMS 2 in an application.

Numerous tools have been developed or adapted to support developing with the foxBMS 2 platform. These tools and their usage are described in Tools Documentation.

Finally, the Developer Manual explains which rules need to be applied when developing for the foxBMS 2 platform.

All sections are listed here: