Announcements and progress on the WII6 buoy.
This is the multi-page printable view of this section. Click here to print.
News
News from the WII6 wave buoy programme.
1 - WII6 is the next buoy
The successor to WII5 has a name, a new board, the maths on the buoy and a data store built to last. Where it stands and what comes next.
The next Waves In Ice buoy is WII6. The processor, operating system, record layout and wave processing have been redesigned. The Sparton motion sensor, proven on multiple WII5 deployments, remains an option.
What WII6 is:
- An STM32U575 running Zephyr in place of the ATmega2560 and Raspberry Pi pair.
- The wave maths on the buoy, in SRAM, tested against reference data whenever the maths changes.
- Iridium Certus, about 100 kB a message, so the 2 Hz record of a capture can be called back from shore.
- Configurable capture lengths, sampling rates and reporting intervals, with a choice of compact wave results, 2 Hz records or full-rate data.
- An ESP32-S3 debug processor with a WiFi dashboard for the bench and the deck, off at sea.
- One write-once data store for every record, message and run since 2016, with every binary format named, versioned and tested.
Where it stands: the electronics are in bench bring-up on development boards, exercised by a hardware test suite. The dashboard, the console protocol, the maths library and the data store are built and tested on the bench. A board layout and a hull fit-out are the next steps.
This site replaces the WII5 site as the home of the programme. The earlier site stays online for the deployment histories, the public data and the open-source releases.