Hi Glen, The CASPER tools support the Red Pitaya -- https://www.redpitaya.com/Catalog/p57/stemlab-125-10-starter-kit?cat=c99 -- which is ~200 EUR. Somewhat similar in price to the Pluto but admittedly without the RF front end. This support was added in the last couple of years by our South African collaborators based on exactly the argument you just made -- that there should be a lower price of entry to CASPER than any of the other boards provide.
Assuming that there is enough available information about the Pluto to run custom firmware / software on it I don't think it would be that difficult for someone to add support for it. Of course, given the $$$s of MATLAB/Xilinx licenses GNUradio might be a better fit. Though the collaboration is working on removing some of those barriers as well. Same goes for the more powerful Red Pitaya board someone posted on the maillist a week or two ago -- adding CASPER support for that would be fairly straightforward. There are currently an enormous number of new platforms people are scrambling to use, so the toolflow devs are pretty swamped, but in all of these cases I think if someone can demonstrate that adding support would result in some real users benefiting then I would hope someone in the collaboration could be convinced to do the dev work. Cheers Jack On Mon, 26 Oct 2020 at 15:12, Glen Langston <glen.i.langs...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hello Casperites, > > I’ve been following quietly, since I’ve not built any useful > Casper-like-devices since we built “Ruppi” a decade ago. It was a clone > of the Green Bank Observatory’s Guppi pulsar device (now deceased I think). > We did publish a few pulsar results using the NRAO 140ft. > > As someone promoting radio astronomy and education and outreach, I think > the > CASPER group is a great example. Except the entry level to Xilinx+Casper > is way outside the typical budget of small universities and high schools. > > Analog devices supports a very capable, but small, Xilinx device > at pretty low cost, the ADALM Pluto (Zynq 7010) with 20 MHz sampler > and transmitter. It can work from 0.3 to 3.8 GHz and has 12 bit samples. > > This would be a great introductory CASPER device. The main down sides to > this > device are the very slow USB 2.0 interface and the lack of a precise clock. > > It is a pity that it is too difficult for CASPER to support this > type of device. > > Regards, > > Glen > (NSF) > > > On Oct 26, 2020, at 8:49 AM, Gareth Callanan <gcalla...@ska.ac.za> > wrote: > > > > Hi Casper Community > > > > Now that roach2 has been deprecated, I have been wondering where the > CASPER community is heading in terms of future ADC work. > > > > As far as I can tell there are three options available: > > • SNAP boards - The SNAP boards seem to support the largest number > of options 12 x 250 Msps/ 6 x 500 MSps or 3 x 1000 Msps. SNAP is used by > HERA, but I don't think it is used anywhere else. > > • SKARAB and the SKARAB ADC - The SKARAB ADC can sample at up to 3 > GSps. From what I can tell, it does not seem to be widely used. I imagine > it would be quite an expensive configuration. > > • ZCU111 RFSoC - The ZCU111 RFSoC seems to be a good board for > experimentation, but if we wanted to build a many antenna array (N > 100), > XIlinx may not be quite able/willing to provide us with that many dev > boards. > > Alternatively, maybe there is some cheap FMC ADC out there that could > make everyone happy? (Although then we would need to find an FMC carrier > card) > > > > From the options available, it seems to me that SNAP is the board that > is most likely to be deployed in a large array, and the ZCU111 board is > what is most likely to be used in labs/small arrays. > > > > Is that a correct read of what is available? Or are there other projects > in the works? > > > > We have cheap COTS options for building X/F-Engines. As far as I can > tell, an easily accessible ADC board is the main bottleneck to quickly > prototyping/building a correlator. > > > > Gareth Callanan > > Digital Signal Processing Engineer > > South African Radio Astronomy Observatory(SARAO) > > > > -- > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "casper@lists.berkeley.edu" group. > > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send > an email to casper+unsubscr...@lists.berkeley.edu. > > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/a/lists.berkeley.edu/d/msgid/casper/CA%2B1nFZTu1S3E%3DaH_KtvPE722UdW49HD0b3YeB07mZbGSGT_7Vw%40mail.gmail.com > . > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups " > casper@lists.berkeley.edu" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to casper+unsubscr...@lists.berkeley.edu. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/a/lists.berkeley.edu/d/msgid/casper/69BA2A35-9B7F-4794-BAD9-46860BFC7853%40gmail.com > . > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "casper@lists.berkeley.edu" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to casper+unsubscr...@lists.berkeley.edu. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/lists.berkeley.edu/d/msgid/casper/CAG1GKS%3DOyp0%3D91L18Q0i6oziMwZOFckUX1ZJ6QQiEPZzV5VdhQ%40mail.gmail.com.
