Inside MIT Motorsports

Every year, MIT Motorsports takes on a challenge that would intimidate most professional engineering teams: designing, manufacturing, and racing an entirely new electric Formula-style race car from the ground up.

As a student-run organization competing in Formula SAE Electric, the world’s largest collegiate engineering design competition, with more than 600 universities, team members routinely devote 20+ hours per week outside of full-time coursework. Building a competitive car means sweating the small stuff: every gram, every watt, every data packet, and every component.

Upgrading the Sensor Stack Meant Upgrading the Network

MIT Motorsports had already integrated BotBlox’s SPEBlox 1G automotive Ethernet converter into previous vehicles, using it to interface with a Hesai OT128 LiDAR sensor. For the new race car, the team upgraded to the Hesai ATX LiDAR, and that hardware change introduced an important networking challenge.

Unlike the previous sensor, the Hesai ATX communicates over 100BASE-T1 Automotive Ethernet rather than Gigabit Automotive Ethernet. While both technologies share the same automotive Ethernet family, they operate under different physical layer standards and are not electrically compatible: using the wrong PHY would prevent the devices from establishing a link altogether.

The new LiDAR therefore required a converter specifically designed for 100BASE-T1 communication.

A Simple Hardware Swap

The swap was straightforward. The team replaced their previous converter with the SPEBlox 100M, BotBlox’s compact 100BASE-T1 Automotive Ethernet converter, allowing the Hesai ATX LiDAR to communicate seamlessly with the vehicle’s standard Ethernet network while preserving the compact, lightweight design required inside a Formula SAE car.

The Results

Formula SAE cars are exercises in optimization, where space, weight and reliability are all carefully considered. The SPEBlox 100M complemented those design priorities with its compact, lightweight form factor and native 100BASE-T1 support, enabling MIT Motorsports to integrate the new LiDAR without compromising the vehicle’s tightly engineered electronics architecture.

By offering specialized automotive Ethernet products in compact form factors, BotBlox enabled the engineering team to adopt new sensors and technologies without redesigning their entire network architecture. For MIT Motorsports, the SPEBlox 100M wasn’t just another component, it was a seamless way to integrate a new sensor and keep the project moving.