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.

We manually configure the rest of the Pi by plugging a monitor and keyboard into the Pi.

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, which boils down to adding the following to this file /etc/dhcpcd.conf:

interface enp1s0f0
static ip_address=192.168.0.2/24
static routers=192.168.0.1
static domain_name_servers=192.168.0.1

Then, we disabled HCI UART by running

sudo systemctl disable hciuart

SNAP

See SNAP Setup