The foxBMS Documentation

Attention

Welcome to the foxBMS documentation of the first modular open source BMS development platform from the Fraunhofer IISB. foxBMS is a free, open and flexible development environment to design state-of-the-art complex battery management systems.

Note

The present version of the foxBMS Sphinx documentation is 1.6.8. It is available in HTML at https://iisb-foxbms.iisb.fraunhofer.de/foxbms/gen1/docs/html/latest/. More detailed information on the version history can be found in the Releases section. This documentation was generated on 2021-09-03 11:42:42.

Warning

The foxBMS hardware and software is under permanent development. The free and open research and development platform foxBMS 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 4 parts:

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

  • Information about the versions and the related release notes of foxBMS
  • Licenses of the hardware, software and document parts of foxBMS
  • Motivation behind the foxBMS initiative
  • Overview of the hardware and software of foxBMS
  • Roadmap of the upcoming hardware and software components
  • Team involved in the development of foxBMS

In the second part of the documentation, the Getting Started guide can be followed to commission foxBMS rapidly. For getting foxBMS desktop software, obtaining and compiling the sources, and setting up a short test of hard- and software the minium sections to be read are sections 1 to 4 of Getting Started

  • The location of the electronic schematic and layout files in the HTML documentation is indicated
  • The hardware guide describes how the hardware is structured and works
  • The software guide explains how to configure and flash the software
  • The CAN documentation shows how to communicate with the system via the CAN bus

To study and modify the software, the Software Documentation presents the structure of the software and of the most important modules, how the basic tasks are running and how to call user-defined functions. Further, a FAQ is provided to answers the most common questions. A detailed description of the software functions and variables can be found in the Doxygen documentation.

Finally, the Hardware Documentation gives the details needed to understand the foxBMS hardware.