Box Software
There are four devices that require some software configuration: the Valon synthesizer, the SNAP FPGA, the 10 GbE switch, and the Raspberry Pi. These configuration steps should already be performed before we ship a box, but for completeness, here are the steps that we performed.
Valon
We need to configure the valon synthesizer to act as the LO for the downconverter and the reference clock for the SNAP ADC.
Use the GUI tool here to load this configuration file. Next, go to synthesizer -> write registers. Then, save the configuration to flash to preserve this configuration across reboots.
Switch
With the box connected and powered on, create an SSH relay to the switch's configuration interface with
ssh -L 8291:192.168.88.1:8291 user@<the ip address of the server>
Then, using winbox connect to localhost,
select files
on the left, and upload this config file. This should trigger a reboot.
Raspberry Pi
We prepared the RPi image using the standard raspbian lite OS.
As part of the initial image creation, we set the hostname to grex-pi
and enabled password-based SSH.
Using raspi-config
, we did the following:
- disabled the serial login shell
- enabled the hardware serial interface
Then, we disabled the hardware's radios by modifying the config.txt
file like so.
Then, we configured the Pi to have the static IP address of 192.168.0.2
by following this
Then, we disabled HCI UART by running
sudo systemctl disable hciuart
SNAP
See SNAP Setup