From Record-Breaking R25 to an Exciting R26 Season
The 2026 season is already in full swing at Revolve NTNU, and our new members have started R26 with fresh energy and lessons learned from last year. The success of VEGA, our R25 electric and autonomous Formula Student car, has set the bar high – and we’re ready to push even further.
The successful 2025 car from Revolve, VEGA. This year’s model will be revealed, and named, later this spring.
Last year, 67 students from 18 disciplines came together to design, build, and race VEGA. For the first time in our 15-year history, the car was ready three days before its official unveiling at Studentersamfundet in Trondheim, giving us a full month of additional testing compared to previous years, which proved a major advantage once we hit the track.
We competed in three events across Europe last summer:
- Formula Student Austria at the Red Bull Ring
- Formula Student Czech Republic
- Formula Student Germany at the Hockenheimring
Our proudest moment came in the Czech Republic, where we placed 3rd overall in the Electric Vehicle class, and took 1st place in the Driverless Cup.
Tracealyzer in the Engineering Design Event
Percepio Tracealyzer played a key role during the Engineering Design judging sessions. In Formula Student, Engineering Design is about more than building a great car – it’s about demonstrating a deep understanding of your systems and justifying every design decision with data.
With Tracealyzer, we were able to present judges with real trace data from VEGA’s electrical subsystems. Our Battery Management System (BMS), for example, operates under strict timing requirements – cell voltage readings must be sampled, processed, and transmitted over CAN within tight deadlines to ensure safety. Tracealyzer enabled us to visualize task execution times, mutex durations, and interrupt latencies, clearly demonstrating that our system met its real-time constraints.
2026 Focus: Strengthening the BMS
The BMS is also the subsystem that makes the most extensive use of Tracealyzer, and historically it has been the BMS engineers who have been responsible for working with Percepio’s tools. During the 2025 season, we experienced memory-related issues that occasionally caused the system to enter a hard fault state. While these incidents were handled safely, they highlighted the need for deeper insight into our system’s internal behavior.
For the 2026 season, improving memory safety has therefore become a central focus for the BMS team. Rather than waiting for rare failures in the field, we are now deliberately provoking fault scenarios in controlled environments and using Tracealyzer to capture detailed trace data leading up to a hard fault. By analyzing what happens in the system just before failure, we can better understand stack usage, task interactions, and potential memory corruption issues.
In parallel, we are gathering more detailed information about the BMS’s real-time behavior under different load conditions. This helps us verify not only that deadlines are met, but also that the system remains predictable and robust even in edge cases.
Looking Ahead
As we progress through the R26 season, Tracealyzer continues to empower our team with deeper system insight – not just as lines of code, but as a clear, visual representation of our RTOS in action. It strengthens our understanding of how subsystems interact and behave in real time, especially under the strict timing and safety requirements that define Formula Student.
Percepio’s tools continue to make a tangible difference for our student engineers, helping us develop more robust systems while learning industry-relevant development practices. As R26 evolves, that combination of insight, confidence, and hands-on experience will be key to shaping the next chapter of VEGA’s story.
Rohin Njati, BMS Engineer at Revolve NTNU, Trondheim, Norway
Percepio offers free Tracealyzer licenses to qualifying academic institutions and students. Please visit the Licensing page to review the terms and apply for an academic license.