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. 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.
6. 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
7. 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