Running simple SPEC-to-SPEC White Rabbit demo
What is needed ?
To test basic White Rabbit synchronization you would need:
- two desktop computers running GNU/Linux operating system, each having at least one free PCI-Express x4 slot;
- two SPEC boards;
- a pair of SFP transceivers (AXCEN AXGE-1254-0531 and AXCEN
AXGE-3454-0531 are
recommended); - two Digital IO FMC (DIO) boards;
- a roll of G652, single mode fiber.
Note: All those components can be bought as a White Rabbit Kit from Seven Solutions
Step-by-step to get your boards synchronized
1. Plug one DIO FMC board to each of your SPECs.
[photo here]
2. Plug the blue SFP transceiver (AXGE-1254-0531) to the SPEC board which will be later configured as WR Master.
[photo here]
3. Plug the violet SFP transceiver (AXGE-3454-0531) to the SPEC board which will be later configured as WR Slave.
[photo here]
4. Put each of the SPEC board into the PCIe slot of a PC.
Note: This manual descibes a simple configuration of SPEC-to-SPEC demo, where each board is plugged into a separate computer. You can put both PCIe cards in a single computer but then please read the spec-sw manual describing how to use the kernel drivers and userland software with two cards.
5. Connect the two SPEC boards with the fiber cable.
6. Get the release binaries of the White Rabbit PTP Core (WRPC):
binaries
and please follow the instructions in section 3 of the official WRPC
documentation on how to download
them to the FPGA and make a basic configuration of the White Rabbit PTP
Core.
7. You can discipline your Master SPEC with external 10 MHz and 1-PPS signal by connecting them to the appropriate LEMO connectors of DIO FMC board:
[photo here]
After that the SPEC has to be set to GrandMaster so that it will discipline its internal oscillator to provided 10MHz and 1-PPS and propagate this timing information to WR Slave:
wrc# mode grandmaster
wrc# ptp start
8. Finally, on your Slave SPEC you can use the LEMO no.1 connector on the DIO FMC to get the 1-PPS output signal and compare it with the one fed into the WR Master to check the quality of WR synchronization.
[photo here]
You can also use the GUI available from WRPC Shell to monitor the satus of WR Slave synchronization:
wrc# gui