Mission
The Open Aquarium Project develops open specifications and open reference designs for aquarium equipment, so that:
- equipment from different makers works together,
- owners keep control of their systems and their data, and
- no aquarium depends on one company staying in business.
The project publishes specifications that anyone can implement, and reference designs that show the specifications working.
Background
Aquarium controllers, pumps, lights, dosers, and sensors are usually sold as closed ecosystems. Modules from one maker rarely work with a controller from another. Data is kept in each maker’s app or cloud service and is hard to move. When a product is discontinued or a cloud service shuts down, owners can lose features, history, or working equipment. Meanwhile, the animals in an aquarium depend on that equipment every minute of every day.
Open source controllers exist, but there is no shared definition of how equipment should talk, connect, or fail safely. That shared definition is what this project provides.
Scope
The project’s work starts with home aquariums and with reef systems, because that is where controllers and connected equipment are most common. It is not limited to either. Specifications are written so they also apply to freshwater, planted, brackish, and pond systems, and to commercial, public, and research aquariums.
In scope:
- Data: how aquatic systems, equipment, measurements, and maintenance are described and exchanged.
- Communication: how controllers, devices, and applications discover and talk to each other.
- Interfaces: electrical, mechanical, and connector interfaces between controllers, modules, sensors, and actuators.
- Safety: how equipment behaves when something fails.
- Equipment design: the internal design of equipment, such as pumps, lighting, heaters, dosers, and sensors, including its electronics, mechanics, optics, and firmware.
- Reference designs: open hardware and firmware for aquarium equipment, starting with a modular controller.
- Husbandry: guidance on keeping aquatic systems, including recommended water parameter values and procedures for testing, dosing, feeding, and maintenance.
- Conformance: schemas, test vectors, and test procedures that show whether an implementation meets a specification.
Out of scope:
- Selling products. The project publishes designs; anyone, including companies started by project participants, may build and sell products from them.
The legal Scope that bounds patent commitments for specification work is in Scope.
Tenets
Every specification describes how it meets each tenet (see the template in specs/_template/). A specification may state that a tenet does not apply, with reasons, except Safety, which every specification must address.
- Openness. Anyone can implement, build, modify, and sell products based on the project’s specifications and designs without permission or payment. Reference designs publish everything needed to reproduce them: schematics, board layouts, firmware source, bills of materials, enclosure files, and test procedures, in formats that free tools can edit.
- Interoperability. Equipment from different makers works together through specified interfaces. Existing open standards are reused wherever they fit. A specification is approved only after independent implementations show that it works.
- Local control. An aquarium keeps running, and its owner keeps full control, without an internet connection, a cloud account, or any particular vendor. Owners can read and export all the data their equipment collects.
- Safety. Aquarium equipment combines mains electricity, water, and living animals. Specifications define how equipment fails, so that losing power, a network, a controller, a sensor, or a cable leads toward keeping livestock alive and people safe.
- Sustainability. Equipment should be efficient, repairable, and long-lived. Specifications favor replaceable modules, parts with more than one source, and documented repair.
Neutrality
The project is vendor-neutral.
- Reference designs have no special status. They follow the same specifications as any other implementation and receive no exceptions.
- A specification must not favor one maker’s product. Approval requires implementations from more than one organization.
- Anyone may implement the specifications, including makers of closed products.
Working with others
The project works with existing open source aquarium projects and with equipment makers. It prefers adopting a good existing standard over writing a new one, and it aims to make adoption easy for projects and products that already exist.
Changes
This charter is changed by pull request, approved as described in Governance.