That's awesome, David. Can't wait for the first R-II Spectrometer... We'll be waiting for more news!
John > Hi All. > > As you may know a new CASPER board is in the pipeline called ROACH 2. > The design is centred around a Xilinx Virtex-6 SX475T FPGA. It should > be, roughly, a 4-times improvement in terms of overall performance > over ROACH 1. > > Well, the board arrived from assembly just under a week ago and I have > been working at trying to get it to do stuff (other than emit smoke). > The board now boots into uboot, we can JTAG in an FPGA bitstream and > the PowerPC can successfully "talk" to the FPGA. The FTDI USB to JTAG > + serial works like a charm (which is lucky because neither the Xilinx > and Macraigor programmer play along with the JTAG chain). > > So hopefully progress will be good over the coming weeks so we can > start making lots of these board soon;) > > The wiki page is hopelessly out of date, but includes some more > information about ROACH 2: > http://casper.berkeley.edu/wiki/ROACH2 > > I have also uploaded a video of the board in action for your > enjoyment. You can view the video directly here: > http://casper.berkeley.edu/wiki/images/d/d1/Roach2_knight_rider.mpg > > Expect more updates on the casper lists and the wiki soon. > > All the best, > David > > -- > David George > Karoo Array Telescope > Tel: +27 11 442-2434 > Email: [email protected] >
