<aside> 💡 This document is a high-level technical overview of the technology stack that constitutes the Bristlemouth Standard. For the complete detailed documentation see: [Bristlemouth Standard Technology Overview](https://bristlemouth.notion.site/bfbb49c7a7c94bccb49c2a486c374a6a)
</aside>
The Bristlemouth Standard is a full-stack marine hardware interface solution that covers requirements for physical connections through high-level protocol client interfaces.
Bristlemouth leverages relevant technologies and standards from analogous domains (automotive, industrial, and robotics) to create a solution for the marine technology space.
Bristlemouth is designed to work anywhere in the ocean and is optimized to be a great solution for resource-constrained microprocessor environments. Bristlemouth allows modules as simple as a temperature sensor to as complex as a machine learning (ML) camera to be plug-and-play interoperable on the same power and data distribution bus. This streamlines the development of complex marine and sensing applications without the need for slow and risky hardware-integration projects.
By maintaining well-abstracted layers with clean interfaces, Bristlemouth can flexibly grow and adapt to changing application needs.
The goals of flexibility and adaptability drove the core design decisions of using 2-conductor power-line communications (PLC) data modulation and IPv6 networking.
There are a range of well-supported (as well as emerging) PLC data transport protocols designed to work on power distribution buses with minimal signal integrity requirements that allow for a wide range of bitrates, transmission distances, and power consumption. Using this general technology for Bristlemouth provides significant future-facing flexibility to adopt new technologies as available and needed, while minimizing the risk of introducing hardware incompatibilities.
IP networking on Ethernet frames is the most broadly adopted and supported networking technology on the planet. Using IP as the core of Bristlemouth networking provides the potential to directly support other protocol frameworks, or for portions of the Bristlemouth stack to be adapted into other ecosystems.
For example, we can cleanly extend the Bristlemouth stack to include a high-bitrate PLC PHY:
Or, a portion of the Bristlemouth stack could be adapted to enable hardware compatibility with other protocol frameworks, like DDS:
<aside> 💡 COMING SOON! Stay tuned for more design and theory of operation notes on the Bristlemouth connector, power and data distribution, and system design and operation. Documentation updates will be announced in the Bristlemouth community forums.
</aside>