GMSL stands for Gigabit Multimedia Serial Link and it is a SerDes (serializer-deserializer) technology created by then Maxim Integrated, now Analog Devices. It was designed for the automotive industry to help transport video and sensor data over long distances in a car but also managing to handle harsh environments like automotive EMC and temperatures. 

It's by no means a new technology and have been in production for over 20 years going on it's third generation of devices. 

The primary benefit is to reduce cabling and handle large bandwidths of uncompressed data. So on one single coax cable, you can transmit 6Gbps of data, low speed communication (I2C, UART, SPI), and power. Typical distances are around 15m but they could go further.

Historically, GMSL has been limited to the automotive industry with the details keep behind an NDA but now Analog Devices (ADI) has decided to open up this technology publicly with the GMSL2 generation of devices. I've been using a variety of SerDes devices for 10+ years but have been directly supporting GMSL for almost 7. Personally this was really exciting to me because I'm a maker at heart and have always wanted to share this technology with the maker community because I think it could really help enable a lot of cool projects.

In this project, I wanted to make an underwater fish camera and beehive monitoring camera for my wife to watch the fish and bees during the winter. GMSL technology is rated from -40C to 105C (automotive) and has a variety of features that would allow adding remote sensors without the need of additional cables.

The first part of this project will be designing the camera and walking though all the various design ideologies for consideration of using GMSL. I'm doing this project as Tom the hobbyist so all views and opinions are my own but hopefully it could help you make some cool edge camera designs. All the documentation is publicly available without NDA along with the software.