The Bristlemouth Standard is a collection of specifications and constituent standards that describe the requirements for ensuring an interface is compatible in the Bristlemouth technology ecosystem.
The Bristlemouth Standard as a whole isn’t currently governed by a familiar governance body (e.g., IEEE, ANSI, ISO). Rather, Bristlemouth is a community-led effort to curate, develop, and maintain a fully open and freely accessible standard. It’s a standard in its intent to collaboratively capture the requirements, specifications, and norms needed to support a broadly compatible ecosystem of hardware on the Bristlemouth interface.
While Bristlemouth relies on other standards (such as IEEE 802.3) that may be copyrighted and not freely available, the intent is to keep Bristlemouth as open as possible:
Revision history, release notes, and errata. More detail on how Bristlemouth is developed and versioned.
A general overview of how Bristlemouth works, and more detail on the what and why of technologies that are selected and developed for Bristlemouth.
A version-controlled specification that captures requirements and conventions for Bristlemouth compatibilities across the physical connector, power distribution, electrical data physical layer, and low-level networking layer.
An open source software project that implements peer-to-peer messaging middleware, Bristlemouth Control Message Protocol, client APIs, and other high-level protocol features.
The first version and Performance Class of the Bristlemouth Standard — and the first commercially available implementations of Bristlemouth technology — are designed for lower-power shelf-depth applications:
However, Bristlemouth is designed to scale into capabilities to support a broad range of marine sensing and robotics applications: