RF & sensing
Signals in the air: RF links, wireless protocols, acoustic and ultrasonic measurement — everything that happens at the top of a mast, twelve metres above the deck.
Tadorne
duck engineering
Tadorne designs and publishes open hardware: sensors and instruments that mix analogue electronics, picosecond timing, printed mechanics and embedded firmware. One engineering practice moving across several domains, and everything it produces is released as a commons — sources and documentation together.
The first project lives at a sailboat’s masthead and measures wind with no moving parts.
Four modes of travel
Marine-grade hardware
Built for the elements. Marine-grade enclosures, salt-fog corrosion, conformal coating, −40 to +90 °C, and devices expected to run for years without being taken down.
Pragmatic mechanics
3D-printed ASA, off-the-shelf parts, parametric designs — ordinary components asked to do precision work, and designs anybody can rebuild.
Deep tech
Picosecond time-to-digital conversion, chip datasheets read line by line, firmware with signed OTA and rollback, cryptography, AI internals.
Featured project
Early-stage exploration
Penon
An ultrasonic wind sensor for sailboats with no moving parts, corrected for the boat's own motion for racing-grade precision — and a first step toward free and open silicon.
- Moving parts
- 0
- Principle
- Ultrasound
- End goal
- Free silicon
How the work is published
Open by default
Schematics, PCB sources, OpenSCAD mechanics, firmware and the design documents are published together, under free licences. A sensor nobody can rebuild is not a contribution to the commons.
Verifiable, not trusted
Every release is signed with one GPG key, anchored in DNS under tadorne.org with DNSSEC. Check the signature, not the author.
Show the numbers
Specifications, error budgets and failed experiments are published as they are. ±0.1 m/s means an error budget somebody can audit; "high accuracy" means nothing.