The Swissloop team from Switzerland won four out of six technical awards with their newest hyperloop prototype pod «Bertrand Piccard» at the fourth European Hyperloop Week in July in Edinburgh, Scotland. The wins included «Sense and Control Subsystem», «Electrical Subsystem», and the prestigious «Complete System Award», which recognised «Bertrand Piccard» as the best Hyperloop prototype.
The team is known for designing and assembling their complete electronics in-house and to write the embedded software for the power electronics controllers, the battery management system and the vehicle control unit themselves. The «Bertrand Piccard» uses STM32H7 and -L5 microcontrollers running FreeRTOS.
To achieve high reliability and complete safety, it was important to ensure correct timing of certain software routines. They are extremely grateful they could use Tracealyzer to help them debug and save precious time in the short project year. The tool made it easy to spot tasks that executed slower than expected, which allowed the engineers to fix software errors quickly. It also revealed that CPU utilization was lower than expected, which leaves room for more complex tasks next year.
ETH Zürich students started it all
Swissloop is an independent non-profit organization that was founded by ETH Zürich students in 2016 to compete in the very first SpaceX Hyperloop Competition by Elon Musk. The teams’ various pod prototypes did score well in the yearly competitions, and in 2020 Swissloop joined in the launch of a new competition, the European Hyperloop Week (EHW), where the team has continued to deliver good results: in 2021 in Valencia, Spain, Swissloop won four out of five technical prizes with the pod «Simon Ammann», and the next year in Delft, in the Netherlands, their pod «Lavinia Heisenberg» won two prestigious technical prizes. And then four more wins for «Bertrand Piccard» with its thoroughly tested software this year.
Today, the Swissloop team is larger than ever with members from different Swiss universities and backgrounds. Swissloop is certain that rapid debugging with Tracealyzer and thoroughly tested software was key to their success in Edinburgh, bringing Hyperloop technology one step closer to reality!
Percepio offers free Tracealyzer licenses to qualified academic institutions and students. Please visit the Licensing page to review the terms and apply for an academic license.