Language Use & Conventions

This document defines the language conventions used throughout the Thermoquad documentation.

Requirement Keywords

The key words “MUST”, “MUST NOT”, “REQUIRED”, “SHALL”, “SHALL NOT”, “SHOULD”, “SHOULD NOT”, “RECOMMENDED”, “MAY”, and “OPTIONAL” in this documentation are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.

Keyword Definitions

Keyword	Meaning
MUST / REQUIRED	Absolute requirement. Implementations that do not comply are non-conformant.
MUST NOT	Absolute prohibition. Implementations that violate this are non-conformant.
SHOULD / RECOMMENDED	There may be valid reasons to ignore this requirement, but implications must be understood and carefully weighed.
SHOULD NOT / NOT RECOMMENDED	There may be valid reasons to allow this behavior, but implications must be understood and carefully weighed.
MAY / OPTIONAL	Truly optional. Implementations may or may not include this feature.

Keyword Preference

This documentation prefers MUST over SHALL for absolute requirements.

Both terms have identical meaning per RFC 2119, but “MUST” is clearer and more commonly understood. Use “MUST” in new documentation. Existing uses of “SHALL” are acceptable but should be updated to “MUST” when documents are revised.

Example:

Preferred: “Appliances MUST respond with their own address”
Acceptable: “Appliances SHALL respond with their own address”

Terminology

Silent Ignore

Throughout this documentation, “ignore” means “silently ignore” unless otherwise specified. The receiver:

Discards the packet or data
Does NOT send any response
Does NOT send any error message
MAY log the event for debugging purposes

Notation Conventions

Hexadecimal Values

Hexadecimal values are written with the 0x prefix:

Byte values: 0x7E, 0xFF
Addresses: 0x0000000000000000 (broadcast), 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF (stateless)
Message types: 0x10 (MOTOR_CONFIG), 0x30 (STATE_DATA)

Byte Order

Little-endian is the default byte order for multi-byte integers
Big-endian is used only for CRC-16 (explicitly noted where applicable)

Ranges

Ranges are expressed as:

Inclusive: “0 to 114” means 0, 1, 2, … 114 (115 values)
Exclusive: “0 to 114 exclusive” means 0, 1, 2, … 113 (114 values)

When not specified, ranges are inclusive.

Units

Standard units used in this documentation:

Quantity	Unit	Abbreviation
Time	milliseconds	ms
Temperature	degrees Celsius	°C
Frequency	revolutions per minute	RPM
PWM period/duty	microseconds	μs
Baud rate	bits per second	baud (e.g., 115200 baud)