In August 2015, when I made first tests with my new Red Pitaya I wasn't very satisfied with the measurement results deliverd by the RP. The given maximum bandwidth for triangle and square wave forms wasn't really achievable because the signals measured on PC with the RP scope app as well as on my analog/digital storage scope Philips PM 3250 were seriously distorted.

A couple of month later I verified and modified the test setup:

  1. Coax cable: Shame on me, I used 75Ω instead of 50Ω cables. The cables are now swapped against new SMA cable.
  2. The 100Mbit/s switch connecting PC and RP probably was not boosting the performance of the data collection coming back from the RP. Thus I implemented a 1GBit/s switch variant. That was planned anyhow.
  3. Red Pitaya published an update of their scope/signal generator application, which I installed and used for my second test round.

With these improvements I retested the capability of the RP to produce square and triangle waves up to 10 MHz.

The result: Much, much better this time. The Red Dragonfruit made an excellent impression. 

my_red_pitayaMy wife !! surprised me with a great birthday present - a Red Pitaya.

Red Pitaya is a linux based, open source powered development board. The hardware (14 bit ! ADC, FPGA and much more goodies), is designed to be able to act as a measurement instrument, - for example an oscilloscope, a function generator, a  spectrum analyzer. Wow! And it has potential for many more use cases, since it can be programmed by the user. Read more about this project at the red pitaya homepage.

I will mainly use it as measurement tool for electronic designs, repairs, etc.