Steering and Organization

Bristlemouth is currently being incubated by Sofar Ocean Technologies, who is working collaboratively with developers across the marine space to support and grow the standard.

<aside> 💡 *You’ll note there are several detailed specifications or test requirements labeled as still being developed ***in the early versions of the standard. These are areas we believe should be covered in the specification, but for which we are seeking collaborators to help define the details. Please reach out if you’re interested!

</aside>

Bristlemouth Standard Specification Versions

Development Philosophy

As we introduce Bristlemouth to the broader marine technology development community, we expect to learn a lot from initial use cases and applications about what Bristlemouth should be.

In maintaining the Bristlemouth standard, we want to find the right balance between the strictness that guarantees reliability and the open space to find the right solutions through iteration and collaboration.

We expect the Bristlemouth network protocol layers to evolve much more rapidly than the hardware layers. This pace of change can also be managed more safely — as backward compatibility in the protocol layers — and be explicitly preserved. Bristlemouth’s built-in firmware update mechanism provides a bootstrapping path for extant systems. To accommodate this rapid pace of development, we’ve decided to divide the overall Bristlemouth standard between two common approaches:

• A version-controlled Bristlemouth Standard Specification document that covers hardware and low-level networking requirements (see table above).

• An open source Bristlemouth Protocol software project that develops and maintains Bristlemouth Middleware and Client Libraries.

  • Project on Github: https://github.com/bristlemouth/bm_protocol
  • Documentation: Bristlemouth Protocol Documentation

  

As Bristlemouth matures as a technology and organization, we’ll continually refine the processes and tools for developing and capturing the specification.

Performance Classes

As a standard, Bristlemouth is designed to provide hardware connector interfaces, power distribution, and data distribution capabilities that work everywhere in the ocean and for a wide range of marine applications. To reduce time to market for manufacturers developing the initial Bristlemouth ecosystem, we borrow a model of “Performance Classes” common in IEEE specifications and familiar in standards such as USB.

The Bristlemouth Performance Classes describe the operational limits of maximum water depth, power distribution, and data distribution for a compliant Bristlemouth module. In considering the definition and evolution of of Performance Classes and the relevant solutions to satisfy them, we employ the following guidelines:

• Lower-performance classes should be less capable than higher classes across the relevant capability dimensions.
• Modules from different performance classes should be functionally compatible, with the performance class differences only constraining the operational limits of the resulting system.
• Performance Classes should be specified in such a way that as the technology ecosystems matures, lower classes can be deprecated, and new module developers will generally select the highest performance class with currently available implementations.

Versioning

For versioning the Bristlemouth Standard Specification and the open source Bristlemouth Protocol software project, we use a semantic versioning method: <major>.<minor>.<patch>, for example 1.0.0.