[casper] Hardware Porting Workshop June/July 2019 Poll

[Adam Isaacson]

Dear Casperites,

I am planning on holding another CASPER Hardware Porting Workshop in South
Africa next year. It is likely to be held at the same venue as this year,
the South African Astronomical Observatory Auditorium in Cape Town.

This year's workshop proved to be very successful and now CASPER has
decided to hold one every year - well done to everyone who contributed in
making this happen.

For those that missed it, we had guys from INAF, Peralex, ASIAA, NAOC,
University of Berkeley, SARAO and University of Oxford and RAL come to this
workshop to learn how to "casperise" their boards so that their boards
could work fully with the current CASPER toolflow. The firmware for the
SKARAB ADC was integrated into the toolflow by the Peralex team (Clifford
van Dyk, Gavin Teague and Francois Tolmie). The iTPM hardware was
casperised by Andrea Mattana, Riccardo Chiello and Matt Roberts. Homin
Jiang created a yellow block for the ASIAA FMC ADC that interfaces with the
Xilinx VCU118 development kit and many improvements were made to the SKARAB
firmware and software. The feedback from the workshop was very positive and
many stated that having the experienced toolflow team on hand really made
the difference.

I would like to offer the same workshop this year, but with the added
benefit of attracting final year or postgraduate students to the workshop.
During the CASPER conference in China this year, it has been decided to
"casperise" cheaper boards in order to attract the university students to
the CASPER community and discover new talent that can benefit the
community. In order to do this, we will "casperise" the affordable Red
Pitaya hardware and offer porting tutorials for all levels of experience
during the workshop. We will have a leader team of between 11-12
experienced toolflow users on hand to assist any level of CASPER toolflow
user. We will cover presentations on CASPER, the toolflow, the Red Pitaya
and FPGAs in general. So whether you have your own hardware you want to
casperise or you want to try the Red Pitaya, then this workshop is for you!
The workshop will be run in June/July 2019 in order to coincide with the
South African university holidays.

For more info on the Red Pitaya hardware platform:

https://www.redpitaya.com <https://www.redpitaya.com>

I am only looking for those interested in attending for now, so that I can
get an idea of numbers - please fill in the poll below. I am expecting
10-15 SA and African partner Students to attend. We expect a total of about
30 people. I am still in the process of applying for my budget and my
budget will only cover SA students and African partner countries - flights,
accommodation and S&T. It will include flight and accommodation of overseas
trainers. Feel free to send me an email directly, if you know of any
students (includes overseas and SA/Africa) that are not on this email list
and would be interested: ***@ska.ac.za. I am intending this workshop
to be free, but this may or may not change depending on the powers that be.
We plan to give away a Red Pitaya Hardware Platform to the student that
performs the best.

*Please fill in the poll below latest by the 30th November 2018*. The
workshop will be for a full week and the dates represent the starting dates
of the workshop. Select all dates that you can make it. I am only
interested in getting an idea of numbers now. More emails to follow later.
Email me directly (***@ska.ac.za) if you need more info.

https://doodle.com/poll/y2829zke3y69gy3y

Kind regards,

Adam Isaacson
South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO)
Hardware Manager
Cell: ([phone]
Tel: [phone]
email: ***@ska.ac.za