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 <[email protected]> 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 > "[email protected]" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > 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 "[email protected]" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. 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.
