Tritium Limited

Tritium is a small UK-based company run by Carl Schofield, focused on the design and publication of practical marine electronics projects — built from widely available, low-cost parts, with firmware ready to flash.

The projects grew from a specific ambition: a class B AIS transponder for under £200. AIS — the system that lets vessels see each other on chart plotters and dedicated displays — is one of the most important pieces of safety equipment a yacht can carry. Yet a transponder remains out of reach for many sailors, with commercial units typically starting at several hundred pounds. Carl believes that should change.

The NMEA WiFi Bridge and NMEATouch20 are steps toward that goal. Both are designed to be as easy as possible to get going: the WiFi Bridge involves nothing more than connecting a few readily available standard boards together, and the NMEATouch20 can need no wiring at all — power it from a USB cable or from the connectors on the rear of the unit, flash the firmware, and it is ready to use.

Carl is a Chartered Engineer with over 40 years of experience designing electronics and embedded systems. He designed his first yacht instrument system to compute and display VMG in 1980 — a year before B&G's first such product. He has spent 20 years in the lifeboat service and 50 years sailing around Europe and the UK. The Tritium projects are shaped by that experience: what actually matters when something goes wrong at sea, and what makes a piece of equipment worth having aboard.

Firmware is provided free of charge. Source code for individual projects is not published, but all third-party components used are listed on the licences page.