I just discovered the Red Pitaya board and borrowed a unit to play during this weekend. It seems there is a real buzz starting around this Open source board and ecosystem since they started to be distributed by RS components. It seems to be issued from a successful crowd-funding that started in 2013.

For detailed info see their website: Redpitaya site Basically it is a physical board the size of an Arduino Mega 2560 which runs a dual core ARM under a Linux flavor and provide Web server applications, along with a Virtex FPGA driving high frequency acquisition hardware. Basic functionality consist in 2 Data acquisition 50MS/s 14bits built-in channels and two other built-in channels for signal generation + memory and all the stuff . So basically it is the combination of a dual channel 14 bits 50Mhz scope and a arbitrary waveform synthesizer, plus a couple of I/O's and slow(?) 100kHz ADC inputs, so it can be used for controlling external hardware like a Raspberry Pi or (to a lesser extend I believe) like an Arduino.

It seems that the guys from Matlab and National Instruments are already proposing seamless interfaces to their respective ecosystems. It also exists on Python, C,etc... and will shortly use Web UI application development(whatever it is...I am not specialist). The last but not the least is that this board is sold about $325 (count +$100 for a complete kit with 2 scope probes and housing) or €300 for the full kit in Europe. It is amazingly cheaper than the sum of the two instruments it can replace, knowing also that the combination of the board ressources allow building standalone virtual instruments like a LCR meter and has the power to drive external sensors or actuators. Of course I have not tried it intensively so I am maybe a bit overenthusiastic... :)

Nevertheless I was a bit disappointed not to find any reference to Mathematica on the Red Pitaya forum, nor did I find any reference to Red Pitaya on Mathematica Stack Exchange. Following some advice, I post here to get some feedback from potential users or developpers who has heard about the thing or thinks it could be interesting.

My first question was "Can someone give me some leads to a tutorial that shows how to start with the board? " , but it seems that there is no such tutorial available yet, not on devices.wolfram.com anyway. So maybe this post can trigger some interest in the developer's community so they can give some advices of "how to start", such as: - should I go to use pitaya C libraries and call them from Mathematica? - is there an easy way to communicate from Mathematica through Ethernet with the board? - Is the use of MathLink a good start? - Is it possible to call the Malab interface from Mathematica?...all these different approach and I am probably far away from a good approach since I am not specialist AT ALL of these interoperability questions from Mathematica to other environment. My need: In the beginning I just want to store and process a digitized waveform with Mathematica and/or generate an arbitrary waveform, built with Mathematica.

BTW, on Mathematica stack-exchange I have been asked also to give a feedback of why I think connecting this device to Mathematica is important... well, my feeling is that if there are so many other dta acquisition or data processing ecosystems that are interested to join the Redpitaya community is that there is some interest. My personal feeling is that the board could be like an Arduino adventure in the domain of Intrumentations, & data acquisition. And from a professional viewpoint , using this board to prototype real-time hardware in the loop systems would be a dream with Mathematica!

I would be glad for any comment

Best regards

Christian Néel