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 get deployed onto Antarctic sea ice, freeze in, and keep reporting 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: wii5.sh3d.com.au — AVR firmware, schematics, PCB designs, enclosure notes, and the on-board wave-statistics mathematics, along with deployment logs going back to 2012.
Why open it up?
The honest answer 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 — why the power budget is shaped the way it is, how the IMU maths turns accelerations into wave spectra on an 8-bit microcontroller, what actually fails in sea ice — lived in too few heads.
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.
If any of those problems sound like yours — remote monitoring, satellite telemetry, power-constrained firmware — that’s exactly the kind of work I consult on.