Red Pitaya

[johnhind]

Anyone bought one of these? I've been keeping track of this since it launched a few years ago and it looks really exciting, although initially quite expensive for what it is (rather than for what it does). Now it is available at a more reasonable price, I am ready to take the plunge. Only thing is looking at the web site it does not really seem to have much momentum. The app store has pretty much the same few applications as it did a year ago and these seem very basic compared to the capabilities of the hardware. The forums have tumble weed blowing through them (worse than here). Am I wrong - is the action elsewhere? I'd like to get my hand in developing on this platform, but lack of visible activity suggests the learning curve may just be too steep.

Anyone with practical experience?

[luchenbe]

I just bought one at the new discounted price of 215€ and received it yesterday by mail. I just started experimenting with it and I'm fairly disappointed about the open source software that's available for it. It looks to me that development has stalled .... Some examples: the scope software is extremely limited in available settings: one cannot set any parameters you find on normal simple oscilloscopes, like setting the time base, delayed sweep, set sensitivity, ... Same goes for the spectrum analyser, where there are only very few fixed settings for the sweep width and each goes from 0 to the maximum frequency. As it's obvious that the hardware is powerful enough to do a lot more advanced functions, it seems the project has failed to deliver it's promises completely. I would not be surprised if the development team would announce they stopped the project completely .... A massive blow for open source again I'm afraid ...
For the Red Pitaya to become useful as a measurement instrument a front end with attenuators should be designed, both for the inputs and the outputs. These should also be controlled by the RP, and would again require the software to be extended for that.

[johnhind]

Thanks for confirming my suspicions. This is a great pity - I cannot believe the published apps use more than a tiny fraction of the FPGA capacity. You make a good point about input circuits though - it worried me that the LCR meter required external components. They seem to have put a huge effort into making it programmer friendly but to little effect in terms of third party apps. This worried me that there were non-obvious barriers to entry which were preventing third party applications getting to first base.

A real pity since they seem to have had a lot of success getting heavy-weight distributors signed up, which is unusual for kickstarter type developments.