Announcements and updates.
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News
Announcements and project updates.
1 - WII5 Site Launch and First Open-Source Release
Announcing the public WII5 documentation site and the first open-source release of the buoy firmware. May 2026.
May 2026. This site goes live today, and with it the first open-source release of WII5 source material.
What’s public from launch:
- Firmware — the AVR / ESP32 C++ control code that runs on every WII5 buoy, now mirrored at gitea.sh3d.com.au/Sh3d/WII5Firmware. The page carries code highlights and deep links into the repository.
- Buoys catalog — every generation from WII1 through WII5, plus electronics, enclosures, test equipment, and the onboard data-processing host.
- Data — pointer pages to the public Mendeley archives for SIPEX II, PIPERS, and JARE-61, plus the publications bibliography (including the 2014 Nature paper).
- History — deployment-by-deployment log going back to the 2014 NIWA work that produced the seminal Nature result.
The rest of the WII repository family — earlier dashboards, servers, maths tooling, test rigs, data archives — is inventoried at Software → Other and is possibly available on request. None of it has been individually assessed for release yet (licensing, customer-specific identifiers, third-party dependencies all need looking at first). If something there sounds useful, ask and we’ll review it.
The reasoning behind the release is on the Why page: continuity, auditability, due diligence, and as a way to make the work discoverable. It’s a starting point, not a finished product — feedback welcome.
— Scott Penrose (contact)
2 - Random Recovery
An unexpected buoy recovery in August 2018.
Placeholder. Replace with the story behind the recovery — where it was found, by whom, and what state the buoy came back in.