Releases · ALBATROS-Experiment/sparrow-albatros

June 27 Sparrow software, gateware, and disk image versions to go on deployment

The Sparrow's ARM uses SFP3 for Ethernet as the RJ45 port was found to be not fit for purpose.

The Gateware release notes:

v2025-04-17 The (12-stage) FFT bit-grows by 6 bits, which should lower the FFT noise-floor to the minimum given that the polyphase structure adds 6 bits of padding. I chose to get rid of a few bits in the on board correlator so that the fatter outputs could fit comfortably into 64-bit-wide accumulator BRAMs.
- The correlator can accumulate up to 68 seconds but we don't usually correlate more than 6 seconds. This comes at the expense of a few LSBs. We can trade 1 LSB for a doubling in the amount of correlation time.
- We could do a full bit growth to see if that improves anything on what was implemented in this release. If I had infinite time I would test this too.
v2025-04-29 Changed digital gain decimal point interpretation from 17 to 15, this allows us to resolve small-amplitude signals
v2025-06-25 (xc7z035 only): Compiled with mlib devel changes pulled that make Sparrow's ARM do Eth through SFP3 instead of RJ45 port, which has a hardware bug that JH warns could suddenly kill our eth connection (which would be costly in money and data).