Re: [casper] ROACH basic questions
Hi Daniel, Welcome to Casper - the recommendations you received so far are all good, the tutorials will help you a lot. I think one of the things you must bear in mind when working on an open source project like this, is that you have to try to keep up to date - keep an eye on the mailing list in particular and also look out for additions to the wiki - so the printed copy is good to read now, but be aware that sometimes things change! Some logs exist for board configurations, so if you do run into problems, let us know your serial number and any version numbers of things you have changed. If you are in Casper for the long term it would be good to start planning to attend the next workshop where you can put faces to all the email addresses, although that is probably only in about a year's time from now. Regards, Francois On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 3:02 AM, Daniel Esteban Herrera Pena danherr...@udec.cl wrote: Hi Dan John, Thank you very much for your quick reply, the wiki pages of ROACH I have printed out and I keep it as a bible! now I'm going to digest the tutorial section you mentioned. The only thing I have done is basic communication through serial link, so there I will have a lot to play with. About the questions, don't hesitate that the minor inquiry I would have I'll post here :). Cheers! Daniel. Hi Daniel. I agree with what Dan has said. Go to http://casper.berkeley.edu/wiki/Main_Page, look down to the menu on the left, and find the tutorials entry. As far as your questions about versions, etc., I think you have to be a bit careful about making sure the versions match each other. In Green Bank, we have not worried about messing around in the katcp or the borph, or the uboot, we just use what is recommended. See the http://casper.berkeley.edu/wiki/ROACH web page, and near the bottom is a list of documents about ROACH. They are pretty complete, and I hope up to date. Can someone confirm the latest versions of ROACH stuff? Another recommendation that I have is to learn well your tool to analyse the output of the system, either matlab or python, whichever you know best. Good luck, and please do ask questions on the list so that all new users can benefit from the answers! John hi daniel, i recommend you do some of the roach tutorials to learn how to use your system - i think these tutorials include blinking an LED, adding numbers together, (these tutorials teach how to use the operating system, simulink tools, borph) then building and testing a spectrometer, a correlator, (these teach how to use the DSP blocks), and using the 10Gbit ethernet interface to send high speed data into a computer and GPU. best wishes, dan On 09/27/2010 04:25 PM, Daniel Esteban Herrera Pena wrote: Dear CASPER team, I'm glad to be subscribed in your mailing list, I hope to receive some advice from you these days. I'm here because I just joined an Astronomy project in University of Concepcion, Chile. I'm the guy who will be in charge of programming the ROACH, so I would like to be in touch with the creators of this awesome board. My experience is related to hardware synthesis/design with boards like Basys, Nexus and Virtex 2 XUP, programming on verilog with Xilinx software (ISE, some entry-level with EDK). The problem here (for me) is that the ROACH system have almost nothing to do with the boards I had programmed before (or at lest what I could see till now). This ROACH have file-system, kernel and a bootloader, it's almost a PC. I saw the ROACH wiki space, and from there I would like to know: 1.- (from Getting started with ROACH): ROACH comes with Busybox filesystem, why adding another (based on Debian Etch)? What advantages have compared with Busybox? 2.- (from ROACH kernel uboot update): Where can I see the improvements of the lastest uboot image? Do you recommend me to update the default version? 3.- (From setting BORPH on ROACH): I don't clearly have the functions of the kernel and the operating system (BORPH) on the ROACH. Are those the same? 4.- (From setting BORPH on ROACH): What are the differences between the minimal root filesystem and the full-featured filesystem? 5.- Do you have any examples of code that I could program the board? 6.- What is the typical step-by-step instructions for doing something on the ROACH making use of the integrated FPGA? I hope you guys give a hand understanding how this system really works, I really appreciate any contributions to my clarification. Thank you in advance! Best, Daniel. -- Dan Werthimer Space Sciences Lab and Berkeley Wireless Research Center University of Calfornia, Berkeley -- Francois Kapp Sub-system Manager Digital Back End meerKAT SKA South Africa Third Floor The Park Park Road (off Alexandra Road) Pinelands 7405 Western Cape South Africa Latitude: -33.9359 deg.; Longitude: 18.5102 deg. (p) +27 (0)21 506 7300 (p) +27
Re: [casper] ROACH basic questions
Hi guys I've updated (and expanded) the wiki page here: http://casper.berkeley.edu/wiki/LatestVersions It should now list all the ROACH component versions (including links to their binaries in SVN) and a couple of bugs to watch out for on the ROACH boards. Jason On 28 Sep 2010, at 08:28, Francois Kapp wrote: Hi Daniel, Welcome to Casper - the recommendations you received so far are all good, the tutorials will help you a lot. I think one of the things you must bear in mind when working on an open source project like this, is that you have to try to keep up to date - keep an eye on the mailing list in particular and also look out for additions to the wiki - so the printed copy is good to read now, but be aware that sometimes things change! Some logs exist for board configurations, so if you do run into problems, let us know your serial number and any version numbers of things you have changed. If you are in Casper for the long term it would be good to start planning to attend the next workshop where you can put faces to all the email addresses, although that is probably only in about a year's time from now. Regards, Francois On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 3:02 AM, Daniel Esteban Herrera Pena danherr...@udec.cl wrote: Hi Dan John, Thank you very much for your quick reply, the wiki pages of ROACH I have printed out and I keep it as a bible! now I'm going to digest the tutorial section you mentioned. The only thing I have done is basic communication through serial link, so there I will have a lot to play with. About the questions, don't hesitate that the minor inquiry I would have I'll post here :). Cheers! Daniel. Hi Daniel. I agree with what Dan has said. Go to http://casper.berkeley.edu/wiki/Main_Page, look down to the menu on the left, and find the tutorials entry. As far as your questions about versions, etc., I think you have to be a bit careful about making sure the versions match each other. In Green Bank, we have not worried about messing around in the katcp or the borph, or the uboot, we just use what is recommended. See the http://casper.berkeley.edu/wiki/ROACH web page, and near the bottom is a list of documents about ROACH. They are pretty complete, and I hope up to date. Can someone confirm the latest versions of ROACH stuff? Another recommendation that I have is to learn well your tool to analyse the output of the system, either matlab or python, whichever you know best. Good luck, and please do ask questions on the list so that all new users can benefit from the answers! John hi daniel, i recommend you do some of the roach tutorials to learn how to use your system - i think these tutorials include blinking an LED, adding numbers together, (these tutorials teach how to use the operating system, simulink tools, borph) then building and testing a spectrometer, a correlator, (these teach how to use the DSP blocks), and using the 10Gbit ethernet interface to send high speed data into a computer and GPU. best wishes, dan On 09/27/2010 04:25 PM, Daniel Esteban Herrera Pena wrote: Dear CASPER team, I'm glad to be subscribed in your mailing list, I hope to receive some advice from you these days. I'm here because I just joined an Astronomy project in University of Concepcion, Chile. I'm the guy who will be in charge of programming the ROACH, so I would like to be in touch with the creators of this awesome board. My experience is related to hardware synthesis/design with boards like Basys, Nexus and Virtex 2 XUP, programming on verilog with Xilinx software (ISE, some entry-level with EDK). The problem here (for me) is that the ROACH system have almost nothing to do with the boards I had programmed before (or at lest what I could see till now). This ROACH have file-system, kernel and a bootloader, it's almost a PC. I saw the ROACH wiki space, and from there I would like to know: 1.- (from Getting started with ROACH): ROACH comes with Busybox filesystem, why adding another (based on Debian Etch)? What advantages have compared with Busybox? 2.- (from ROACH kernel uboot update): Where can I see the improvements of the lastest uboot image? Do you recommend me to update the default version? 3.- (From setting BORPH on ROACH): I don't clearly have the functions of the kernel and the operating system (BORPH) on the ROACH. Are those the same? 4.- (From setting BORPH on ROACH): What are the differences between the minimal root filesystem and the full-featured filesystem? 5.- Do you have any examples of code that I could program the board? 6.- What is the typical step-by-step instructions for doing something on the ROACH making use of the integrated FPGA? I hope you guys give a hand understanding how this system really works, I really appreciate any contributions to my clarification. Thank you in advance! Best, Daniel. --
[casper] ROACH basic questions
Dear CASPER team, I'm glad to be subscribed in your mailing list, I hope to receive some advice from you these days. I'm here because I just joined an Astronomy project in University of Concepcion, Chile. I'm the guy who will be in charge of programming the ROACH, so I would like to be in touch with the creators of this awesome board. My experience is related to hardware synthesis/design with boards like Basys, Nexus and Virtex 2 XUP, programming on verilog with Xilinx software (ISE, some entry-level with EDK). The problem here (for me) is that the ROACH system have almost nothing to do with the boards I had programmed before (or at lest what I could see till now). This ROACH have file-system, kernel and a bootloader, it's almost a PC. I saw the ROACH wiki space, and from there I would like to know: 1.- (from Getting started with ROACH): ROACH comes with Busybox filesystem, why adding another (based on Debian Etch)? What advantages have compared with Busybox? 2.- (from ROACH kernel uboot update): Where can I see the improvements of the lastest uboot image? Do you recommend me to update the default version? 3.- (From setting BORPH on ROACH): I don't clearly have the functions of the kernel and the operating system (BORPH) on the ROACH. Are those the same? 4.- (From setting BORPH on ROACH): What are the differences between the minimal root filesystem and the full-featured filesystem? 5.- Do you have any examples of code that I could program the board? 6.- What is the typical step-by-step instructions for doing something on the ROACH making use of the integrated FPGA? I hope you guys give a hand understanding how this system really works, I really appreciate any contributions to my clarification. Thank you in advance! Best, Daniel.
Re: [casper] ROACH basic questions
Hi Dan John, Thank you very much for your quick reply, the wiki pages of ROACH I have printed out and I keep it as a bible! now I'm going to digest the tutorial section you mentioned. The only thing I have done is basic communication through serial link, so there I will have a lot to play with. About the questions, don't hesitate that the minor inquiry I would have I'll post here :). Cheers! Daniel. Hi Daniel. I agree with what Dan has said. Go to http://casper.berkeley.edu/wiki/Main_Page, look down to the menu on the left, and find the tutorials entry. As far as your questions about versions, etc., I think you have to be a bit careful about making sure the versions match each other. In Green Bank, we have not worried about messing around in the katcp or the borph, or the uboot, we just use what is recommended. See the http://casper.berkeley.edu/wiki/ROACH web page, and near the bottom is a list of documents about ROACH. They are pretty complete, and I hope up to date. Can someone confirm the latest versions of ROACH stuff? Another recommendation that I have is to learn well your tool to analyse the output of the system, either matlab or python, whichever you know best. Good luck, and please do ask questions on the list so that all new users can benefit from the answers! John hi daniel, i recommend you do some of the roach tutorials to learn how to use your system - i think these tutorials include blinking an LED, adding numbers together, (these tutorials teach how to use the operating system, simulink tools, borph) then building and testing a spectrometer, a correlator, (these teach how to use the DSP blocks), and using the 10Gbit ethernet interface to send high speed data into a computer and GPU. best wishes, dan On 09/27/2010 04:25 PM, Daniel Esteban Herrera Pena wrote: Dear CASPER team, I'm glad to be subscribed in your mailing list, I hope to receive some advice from you these days. I'm here because I just joined an Astronomy project in University of Concepcion, Chile. I'm the guy who will be in charge of programming the ROACH, so I would like to be in touch with the creators of this awesome board. My experience is related to hardware synthesis/design with boards like Basys, Nexus and Virtex 2 XUP, programming on verilog with Xilinx software (ISE, some entry-level with EDK). The problem here (for me) is that the ROACH system have almost nothing to do with the boards I had programmed before (or at lest what I could see till now). This ROACH have file-system, kernel and a bootloader, it's almost a PC. I saw the ROACH wiki space, and from there I would like to know: 1.- (from Getting started with ROACH): ROACH comes with Busybox filesystem, why adding another (based on Debian Etch)? What advantages have compared with Busybox? 2.- (from ROACH kernel uboot update): Where can I see the improvements of the lastest uboot image? Do you recommend me to update the default version? 3.- (From setting BORPH on ROACH): I don't clearly have the functions of the kernel and the operating system (BORPH) on the ROACH. Are those the same? 4.- (From setting BORPH on ROACH): What are the differences between the minimal root filesystem and the full-featured filesystem? 5.- Do you have any examples of code that I could program the board? 6.- What is the typical step-by-step instructions for doing something on the ROACH making use of the integrated FPGA? I hope you guys give a hand understanding how this system really works, I really appreciate any contributions to my clarification. Thank you in advance! Best, Daniel. -- Dan Werthimer Space Sciences Lab and Berkeley Wireless Research Center University of Calfornia, Berkeley
