White Rabbit Starting Kit
About the White Rabbit technology
White Rabbit is an extension to Ethernet network with sub-nanosecond accurate synchronization and gigabit rate data transfer speed. You can find more information on White Rabbit technology and use-cases on:
About the Starting Kit
The Starting Kit has been designed to test and check if the White Rabbit technology meets your requirements and also to ease the understanding on what one can do with it and how to integrate it in your own project. It is the easiest way to get aquainted with White Rabbit technology.
The starting kit uses two SPEC
and fmc-dio-5chttla FMC 5-channel Digital I/O
module cards also
called nodes in the White Rabbit world. Each node makes basic
operations such as input timestamping or programmable output pulse
generation.
Additionally, specific software and gateware layers allow to use it as a
standard network interface card implementing the White Rabbit
functionality.
Network packets with accurate time-stamping information are generated
and timestamped at the hardware level to achieve the highest accuracy.
Example starting kit setup for PPS synchronization
Documentation
The White Rabbit Starting Kit is based on different projects:
- spec-sw:: driver to communicate to the card through PCIe and a set of tools to experiments
- wr-nic:: gateware that includes the NIC & DIO capabilities.
- wrpc-sw: white rabbit PTP firmware for the synchronization.
Commercial producers
You can buy the SPEC and fmc-dio-5chttla FMC 5-channel Digital I/O module separately from different vendors. You also need different cables to repeat the experiments described in the White Rabbit Starting Kit manual. For your convenience you can also buy a complete kit that includes everything you need.
Status
Date | Event |
---|---|
22-11-2012 | Start working on project |
15-02-2013 | Release v1.0 |
16-05-2014 | Release v2.0 |
31-10-2018 | Starting project to update gateware and software to latest releases of Linux (16.04/18.04, currently work only up to 14.04.) and WRPC 4.2. |
22-07-2019 | Scheduled for Q4 of 2019 a project to add two new features: 1) Local generation of output pulse of configurable width at configurable frequency, 2)-Local generation of interrupts at a configurable frequency (we need 1kHz) that are timestamped |
18-12-2019 | Release v3.0 |
18-01-2021 | Release v3.1 |
Known issues
-
wr-starting-kit-v3.0
- Git submodule initialization fails trying to retrieve wr-cores. Commit 436beb5c fixes it.
Authors: Benoit Rat, Seven Solutions