Marine electronics and their proprietary protocols

[mgrouch]

I think recreational marine industry is hurting itself by making things proprietary. It’s just reducing their market. Less people can afford buying boats and their products as result.

SignalK protocol is a good attempt to make a de facto conventional transport protocol which works fast on modern hardware.

I think what is missing in SignalK protocol is making it more rich and superior in formalized type of data it can transport. NMEA 2000 is missing some quite basic things. No PGN for illuminance, not PGN for lighting strike sensors.
And NMEA 2000 s binary, which means realistically with speed of all modern chips that it’s just convoluted to slow down adoption and make it more expensive. Performance gains are really small.

I think SignalK team should just come up with some kind of RFC spec for a standard which would cover transport protocol (reacher than NMEA) and physical protocol (simple Ethernet), and type of physical connector and wiring them.

Move away from proprietary standards for which you have to pay to just implement something based on them.