Embedded Battery Management Systems from the Ground Up™

Develop the embedded intelligence behind battery-powered systems.

Want to develop the embedded systems behind electric vehicles, renewable-energy storage, and battery-powered robots?

Across these applications, battery performance depends on more than cell chemistry and capacity. It also depends on the system that monitors the cells, estimates available charge, manages imbalance, and responds when operating limits are exceeded.

That system is the Battery Management System, or BMS.

For an embedded engineer, BMS development brings together measurement, estimation, real-time control, and fault handling in one demanding application. Decisions made in firmware influence how a battery’s energy can be used, when operation must be restricted, and how the system responds to abnormal conditions.

Embedded Battery Management Systems from the Ground Up™ teaches you to connect battery fundamentals with the architecture, firmware, and verification of an embedded battery supervisor.

Using STM32 and STMicroelectronics’ L9961 battery-management device, you will progress from understanding battery behavior to implementing and testing the logic that governs a five-cell system.

Understand the battery. Engineer the response.

An acceptable pack voltage can conceal an individual cell approaching its limit. A small current-measurement offset can accumulate into a significant state-of-charge error. A fault indication requires a defined response, including when to restrict operation and under what conditions recovery is permitted.

These are the engineering relationships you will learn to recognize and implement.

The course connects the physical behavior of cells and packs to the software decisions required to manage them. You will develop an understanding of what the measurements reveal, where their limitations lie, and how those limitations should shape system behavior.

Build the core capabilities of a battery-management application.

• Measurement and data integrity: Acquire cell voltages, stack voltage, current, and temperature. Check consistency, plausibility, and freshness before using those measurements to make control decisions.
• State-of-charge estimation: Implement coulomb counting, handle initialization and numerical limits, and investigate how current offset and capacity assumptions affect the estimate.
• Cell-balancing strategy: Translate cell-voltage differences into passive-balancing decisions, with operating constraints and hysteresis to govern when balancing starts and stops.
• Protection and fault management: Implement voltage, current, and temperature limits. Define fault qualification, severity, latching, and recovery behavior.
• System coordination: Organize initialization, monitoring, balancing, and fault response through an explicit state machine that connects operating conditions to permitted actions.
• Verification and diagnostics: Exercise controlled scenarios, inspect live measurements, and use structured telemetry to verify that the firmware responds as intended.

Develop the architecture that connects these capabilities.

A functioning BMS application requires more than individually correct algorithms. Measurements, estimates, protection decisions, and physical controls must work together consistently.

You will build that integration.

The implementation separates hardware access from application policy, keeping measurement acquisition, estimation, protection, and actuation clearly defined. Course-owned STM32 peripheral code uses CMSIS and direct register access, while ST’s L9961 component driver is integrated through a dedicated adaptation layer.

This gives you practical experience in an important engineering discipline: combining manufacturer-supplied device software with your own platform code and system architecture.

Demonstrate an integrated five-cell battery supervisor.

The practical work culminates in a supervisor that combines live measurement acquisition, state-of-charge estimation, balancing, protection handling, switch control, and diagnostic telemetry.

You will trace the system from initialization into normal operation, verify a controlled balancing event, and examine its response to an introduced fault.

The objective is to make every stage understandable and observable: what the system measured, what it concluded, which action it requested, and whether the resulting behavior matched the design.

You leave with an integrated reference implementation and the reasoning behind its architecture, algorithms, and control policies.

Apply your embedded skills to battery-management engineering.

This course is designed for embedded developers and engineers who are comfortable with C and want to develop a grounded understanding of BMS firmware.

Battery-management concepts are introduced from the fundamentals, then connected to implementation and testing. The five-cell platform provides a practical foundation for studying principles relevant to larger systems, without conflating an educational implementation with a production-qualified design.

Enroll in Embedded Battery Management Systems from the Ground Up™ and develop the knowledge, firmware skills, and engineering judgment to build and evaluate an embedded battery-management application.