Software on WII5 — Waves In Ice Buoys

Maths Control

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Linux Maths Control package runs on Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone Black, Intel Edison, and other embedded Linux options. It’s a distribution image plus a set of services, scripts, and a Node web app. It’s commonly called the Maths CPU because the maths code hasn’t been optimised for smaller CPUs — it needs more memory and CPU power than the AVR can offer.

Any of these embedded Linux hosts is fairly power-hungry, so the Maths CPU is only powered up for two reasons:

Server

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The internet-side server collects data from Iridium / satellite delivery, decodes the short-burst-data payloads, stores them, and feeds the viewers and downstream consumers.

Real content will cover:

Iridium short-burst-data mailbox configuration
Server-side decoder — deployment, environment variables, docker-compose
Storage layout and retention policy
How buoys are added and how users are managed
Dashboard entry points

Status: placeholder. Server source to be released.

Analysis

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Offline tools used to analyse archived data: review, validate, convert between formats, and feed scientific workflows that don’t run live against the server.

Status: placeholder. Analysis tooling to be released.

Viewers

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Web-based viewers for buoy data: real-time status, historical trends, GPS tracks, and per-deployment summaries. The viewers consume what the server decodes.

Status: placeholder. Viewer source to be released.

Onboard Data Processing

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The on-board processing pipeline takes raw accelerometer and GPS samples captured by the buoy and reduces them — on the buoy itself — into a compact summary that fits inside an Iridium short-burst-data message: significant wave height, peak period, directional spectrum, energy bands.

Doing the maths on the buoy (rather than transmitting raw samples) is what makes long-duration polar deployments practical — satellite bandwidth is expensive, power-hungry, and unreliable.

The maths code is written in C and compiles for any Linux. On the buoy it runs on the Maths Control host (a low-power Linux board woken briefly to do the calculation), described below.

Other WII Software

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Beyond the pieces already featured under Firmware, Server, Analysis, Viewers, and Onboard Data Processing, the WII project carries a large family of related repositories — earlier buoy generations, dashboards, server tooling, maths libraries, test rigs, and data archives.

None of these have been individually assessed yet, so it’s genuinely unclear which ones can or can’t be released — that’s why they aren’t already public. Some are clean and would be straightforward; others may have licensing, customer-specific identifiers, or third-party dependencies that need looking at first.

Firmware

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The buoy firmware (AVR / ESP32 C++) is documented under Buoys → Firmware — that’s where the source repository link and the code highlights live.

This entry exists here so the Software sidebar has a pointer to it, because firmware is software too.

Go to Buoys → Firmware