albatros_dual_snap_4bit (1).slx is a Simulink design that was previously constructed. It does not correspond to the (.fpg) bistream that we currently use but is thought to conain much of the same logic.

quad_input_poco.slx comes from a casper tutorial and was likely used as a boilerplate for building our current firmware.

reconstruct_albatros_dual_15.slx is my attempt to combine the above two slx files and, using the names of registers used by our software, to reverse engineer our currently firmware to retrieve a source file that compiles to something that is functionally identical to what we currently have.

I have tested reconstruct_albatros_dual_15 on our software but it fails to initialize properly; failing scilently. The bitstream is happy to be written to the FPGA, and our software is able to read/write from/to it's registers. However, when we ask it to report a time-integrated power-spectrum, the data read is all zeros.

In a previous version of our software, the katcp socket (to my understanding this is the protocol used to by our PI to communicate with the FPGA) times-out consistently after 3 minutes of operating. After the three minutes, I start it up again and tour new firmware bitstream works! This makes me think something is going wrong at the initialization stage. However, this problem does not occur if we use the old bitstream (the one we've been using since 2019), i.e. our firmware boots up reliably.

In our current software, the katcp socket does not time-out and our new firmware never outputs anything other than zeros, failing scilently.

In conclusion, this leads me to believe that our new simulink file reconstruct_albatros_dual_15.slx is almost functional. It just doesn't initialize correctly. I have been unable to fix this bug for over a week and am now soliciting help from the casper community. Any advice or help is welcome. On the CASPER Slack I'm Stephen Fay ([email protected]).

The crucial parts of the analysis code are the python files in the root: config_fpga.py and albatrosdigitizer.py (they uses config.ini)