We open-sourced our Antarctic wave buoys
For over a decade I built and maintained the firmware for the Waves In Ice buoys, instruments that are placed on Antarctic sea ice, freeze in, and report wave motion back over Iridium satellite for months at a time. The data from the earlier generations contributed to peer-reviewed science, including a 2014 paper in Nature on storm-induced sea-ice breakup.
That work is now open source as WII5 at wii5.sh3d.com.au: AVR firmware, schematics, PCB designs, enclosure notes, the on-board wave-statistics mathematics, and deployment logs going back to 2012.
Why open it up?
The reason is the bus factor. These buoys have outlived research grants, hardware generations and more than one institution’s involvement. The knowledge of how they work lived in too few heads: why the power budget is shaped the way it is, how the IMU maths turns accelerations into wave spectra on an 8-bit microcontroller, and what fails in sea ice.
Publishing everything means the next research group doesn’t start from zero. They can read the firmware source, see a decade of deployment history, and build on hardware that has already survived the worst environment we could find for it.
What’s in it for an engineer?
Even if you never go near sea ice, the interesting bits are the constraints: ultra-low-power AVR design that runs for months on a fixed battery budget, on-board signal processing because satellite bandwidth is too expensive to ship raw data, and mechanical design that survives being frozen into moving pack ice.
Remote monitoring, satellite telemetry and power-constrained firmware are the areas I consult in.