วีดีโอ

came for the unboxing, stayed for the funky tunes. much appreciated!

you have some review on your channel for the RIGOL RPL1116?

Hello everyone! Ready for a lab PC build? We start out with a touch of cinematic drama because it was a beautiful day and in order to psyche ourselves up for the build. And, because Remote Labs East dared us to. First, the name. Cubic Heavy Open Number Center was suggested by one of our Qualcomm volunteers, who said we had to use the asterisks like WOPR from the movie War-games. Jumping to the end, here's the fancy BIOS screens showing things are working. Here's all the colorful LEDs blinking away. We can program these to do a variety of things. They can simply be decorations, or they can track a wide variety of things going on in the computer. All these lights are visible because the case has class sides. Here's the back, with some of the cable routing. This is before the glass doors went back on. CHONC has all the usual I/O, and you can see a lot of it here in this image. We plan to put the DVB-S2/X modulator and demodulator cards in here. There probably will not be a lot hooked up to CHONC through the traditional ports. After memory tests and other checks, we installed Unraid. What is unRAID? It is an Operating System built based on Linux for storing and managing data. You can freely mix and match drives of different size and speed. We install applications within a container system and manage application access to the network and data. We will run Virtual Machines from unRAID allowing us to set up different machines for different tasks. UnRAID is efficient, fast, and allows virtual appliances to be dedicated to physical hardware. UnRAID is common in the gaming community. Unraid lets you maximize your computer system to be a high-end gaming computer and a home PC at the same time. Here's Paul describing some of the challenges with UnRAID setup.

unRAID is a software layer that installs on standard PC hardware and hosts virtual machines, which might be Windows or Linux or whatever, and Docker containers, and manages the disk drives the same sort of way a Network Attached Storage device would do. At one level, unRAID is just a customized installation of Linux. But it's also a high-performance hardware-assisted hypervisor that achieves performance nearly as good as the bare metal. It's also a very flexible storage manager that can turn an array of physical disk drives into any number of "shares" that look like network disk drives to the virtual machines and containers. Much of it is open source, but some of it is proprietary, so it costs a few dollars to install. The idea here is to build one big, powerful PC, run unRAID on it, and then create any number of virtual machines and containers in all the configurations you might need. If you fully embrace unRAID, you'll set up each job in a separate VM or container, optimized for the needs of that job. The various jobs might need completely different OS configurations, and that's no problem. Thanks to virtualization, they won't interfere with each other. Much. If you set it up right. unRAID wants to manage all the disk drives on the host PC as one big "array", but it still needs something to boot up from. unRAID's solution is to boot from a USB thumb drive. The performance of the thumb drive isn't critical, because unRAID copies it into RAM right away. It only uses the thumb drive to save configuration information for when the system is restarted, never for user data or anything big. So the thumb drive just needs to be a few gigabytes, and compatible with booting the PC, either BIOS or UEFI. Oh, and one other thing: unRAID ties your software license to the unique ID code in the thumb drive, as a form of copy protection. The catch here is that cheap thumb drives don't necessarily have a UUID, so you have to buy a name-brand thumb drive. The first thumb drive I tried was a name brand, but it was a little older. It was *almost* compatible. It had a UUID, and it would boot the PC on initial powerup. I was able to install unRAID and do some initial configuration with this thumb drive. However, I soon discovered that REbooting the system from software didn't work. The machine would instead boot to the BIOS screen, and sit there forever. It didn't recognize the thumb drive on a reboot. That would be a problem for the remote lab, so I switched to a newer drive. unRAID does allow you to switch to a different thumb drive, but the automatic procedure only works once a year. Luckily, the new drive did work correctly, including reboots. The spec for CHONC, the ORI West remote lab PC, and for its counterpart in the ORI East remote lab, called for four huge 16-terabyte drives each. Unfortunately, two of the drives were dead on arrival and have not been replaced yet, so CHONC was built up with only two large disk drives. unRAID can use them both for data, or it can use one of the drives to hold parity data for recovery of the array from a single drive failure. We opted for reliability, so I told unRAID to initialize parity data on one of the drives. It turns out 16 terabytes of parity data is quite a lot of work. It took about 22 hours to initialize the array. When the two replacement drives arrive, it will probably take a while to add them to the array. This is only 2021, and we don't have an infinite budget, so these 16-terabyte drives are the old-fashioned kind with spinning disks and mechanically moving heads. To speed up the random-access performance of the array, unRAID supports using smaller SSD drives as cache for the array. We have two 1-terabyte NVMe SSDs for this purpose. The motherboard has room for three to install, with integrated cooling. Enabling these as cache for the array was just a matter of a few clicks and a short wait. unRAID's primary user interface is through web pages, which you can bring up from an internal VM or from another machine with access to the local network. One of the useful screens is a dashboard status display, and one of the things you can monitor on that screen is the temperature of the CPU and disk drives. When idle, the spinning disk drives run pretty cool, but the cache SSDs are over 50 degrees C, despite the integrated heat sink and fan cooling provided by the motherboard. I'll have to keep an eye on that. The consensus seems to be that SSDs actually work better when they're warm, so maybe it's OK. On the other hand, the manufacturer only rates these SSDs up to about 70 C. CHONC also features a high-end graphics card, an nVidia GeForce RTX 3080. No, we are not planning on mining BitCoin, or playing the latest video game at a high frame rate with the highest graphics settings, but we could! No, the graphics card is for developing and testing signal processing code for DVB-S2/X, or other applications. I don't know yet exactly what's involved, but I'm betting there's no support for virtualizing the GPU for this kind of computation. unRAID supports a hardware-based solution for this type of problem. Any device on the PCIe bus can be mapped exclusively to one virtual machine. It's as if the device didn't exist at all on the main machine or in any other VM. The VM that owns the device can treat it as if it had direct access to the hardware, which it effectively does. Graphics cards, in fact, are the most common use case for mapping PCIe devices to VMs, because gamers are a big part of unRAID's customer base. Games for the PC usually run on Windows, so to run them in unRAID you need a Windows VM. Games make extensive use of the GPU, and gamers push them to the very limit. A game running in a Windows VM needs direct access to the GPU for best performance. There is, of course, a catch. unRAID, like any other operating system running directly on PC hardware, generally expects to have a display card. The BIOS has a way to choose which of multiple display cards belongs to the main console. The best approach would be to designate the on-board graphics or a secondary inexpensive graphics card as the console, and that would free up the fancy GPU for whatever else you needed to do with it. The motherboard that we use in CHONC doesn't have any on-board graphics, and we didn't think to purchase a second graphics card. It IS possible to boot unRAID and still have the one and only graphics card mapped to a VM, but it isn't at all straightforward. There are lots of tricks and magic words you have to say. With the help of various tutorial pages on the web and videos on TH-cam, I was able to come up with combination that works on CHONC. I frankly don't know which of the things I tried worked and which didn't, so I won't try to detail them here, but I did succeed in finding a combination that allows CHONC to run a Windows 10 VM that owns the RTX3080. To test this, I installed Steam, which is a system for distributing games, and I used it to install a video benchmark program. The Windows VM was able to run the benchmark with flawless video and excellent measured performance. I hope this means that GPU programming tools will be able to run on the system as if running on standard hardware. Only one VM at a time can own the GPU, but it is possible to shut down the VM that owns the GPU and boot up another one, so it also owns the GPU. One at a time. Thus, if the GPU programming tools need a Linux VM instead of a Windows VM, that should still be possible. All the other VMs, the ones that don't own the GPU, don't have access to any physical display card. Instead, unRAID provides them with a virtual display card. It looks like an ordinary graphics card to the VM. But instead of looking at a screen, the user has to access the virtual display through the network, using VNC protocol. The user can run VNC from the local VM that does have a physical display, or from any other machine on the local network or even elsewhere on the Internet over the VPN or SSH tunnel. If graphics emulation is not needed, remote access can be managed with a simple terminal emulation scheme over SSH. CHONC lives on the private LAN at the ORI west remote lab. Everybody who had remote access to the temporary Windows machine called Aperture now has equivalent access to the Windows VM on CHONC. Linux VMs can be created on demand, customized to the needs of any particular remote lab use. We look forward to helping remote lab users create exactly the testing environment they need to make best use of the lab resources.

Very nice, but the screen is small. What do you think about a USB-PC Logic Analyzer?

Transcript of speaker biography and talk summaries: Welcome to the Space and Satellite track at Amateur Space Radio Auditorium. We are happy you are here. Our speakers today will be covering a lot of ground and there will be plenty of time for questions and answers. Please visit the Amateur Space Radio exhibit in the Expo Hall for additional content, handouts, and shopping. Visit our Amateur Space Radio lobby for video conference opportunities with amateur satellite experts from around the world on a wide variety of topics. We hope you enjoyed the uplifting dance music set last night by John Brier. John is an active amateur radio satellite operator and educator who also regularly spins EDM records on Twitch. If you would like to hear the set from John Brier, then please visit the booth for the link to the recording. Tonight, we are hosting a unique online social event experience. It’s a virtual scavenger hunt sponsored by Amateur Space Radio. And now, here’s our speaker lineup for today. ============================ “Introduction to Amateur Radio Satellites” Douglas Quagliana, KA2UPW/5 This presentation is an introduction to many of the things you can do with amateur radio satellites including telemetry, tracking, orbital mechanics, digital signal processing, and several really simple satellite antennas you can build. Douglas Quagliana's writings have appeared in CQ/VHF, QRPp, QRP Quarterly, the AMSAT Journal, and AMSAT UK Oscar News. His interests include digital signal processing, telemetry, QRP, and mobile HF. He has a BS and an MS in Computer Science and one patent. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “Working the Easy FM Amateur Satellites” Clint Bradford, K6LCS From getting licensed to finding local clubs to working the "easy" FM amateur satellites - with minimal investment! We'll cover all the basics for you - with plenty of ways to submit any questions you may have afterwards. Lets get you "working the birds" ASAP! Clint Bradford has has been a ham since 1994, and also involved in the commercial side of the communications industry. His “How to Work the Amateur Satellites With Your HT” presentation has informed and delighted more than 100 audiences the past few years: clubs, conventions, and hamfests not only in Southern California, but also to clubs across North America and Canada. He is an ARRL educator, AMSAT Ambassador, and member of several AMSAT chapters across the planet. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “Digital Multiplexing Transponder from Open Research Institute” Bob McGwier, N4HY Thomas Parry Wallie Ritchie WU1Y "Open source, cutting edge, easy to use, affordable, adaptable, and fun. Learn all about exciting and innovative microwave broadband multi-user systems for amateur space and terrestrial use. This is an open source modern design from Open Research Institute, an AMSAT Member Society and registered research institute in the United States. Bob Mcgwier is an Adjunct Professor at Virginia Tech, Former Chief Scientist at the Hume Center, Founder of Hawkeye 360 and Federated Wireless. And that's just what he's done lately. Bob has written code or designed circuits for AMSAT for decades. A gifted engineer with expansive vision, deep algorithmic understanding, enthusiasm, energy, conviction, persistence, and determination, Bob will summarize the community’s efforts to get and achieve GEO, and introduce one of the current efforts to create amateur circuits well worth putting into space. ---- Thomas Parry is a space industry professional from the Netherlands. He serves as Open Research Institute's systems engineer for Phase 4 Space projects. His current work is in analog and digital custom ASIC design, producing mixed signal ICs for sensing and power applications. He works with European Space Agency and previously worked at Clyde Space. Thomas will be presenting the technical overview of the ORI digital microwave transponder project. Wally Ritchie is a highly experienced engineer with experience in Systems Engineering, Firmware Development, FPGAs, Digital Signal Processing. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ “Debris Mitigation in Earth Orbit” Anshul Makkar "How can the Amateur Radio Satellite Service thrive in the New Space Race? In this presentation learn what has been presented to regulators about the bright future of our hobby. Topics include 1) Current issues for Amateur Radio Satellite community. Problem related to Shell, Debris etc. 2) How Amteur Radio Satellite Service can survive 3) Details of Debris Mitigation. 4) Mathematic results from the presenter’s paper 5) GMAT video : Orbit from GTO to GEO 6) GMAT video : Orbit from GEO to graveyard.." "Anshul Makkar is a theorist with a firm belief in hands-on engineering and special interest in research and mathematics. He has contributed to many open source projects and has worked with International teams across the globe. He serves as a senior engineer at Open Research Institute. Fearless when it comes to domain boundaries, Anshul just wants to keeping learning and contributing wherever he can. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “How to Enjoy Amateur Radio Contacts with the International Space Station” Frank Bauer, KA3HDO Rosalie White You can enjoy ham radio contacts through the ARISS radios on the International Space Station. We'll explain how you can have fun trying ARISS packet, SSTV and repeater mode. Intermediate level & even beginners learn how to try off-the-planet hamming. "Frank H. Bauer's aerospace career spans over 40 years within NASA and private industry. Mr. Bauer’s primary research interests include spaceborne applications of the Global Positioning System (GPS) and space vehicle formation flying. He was the principal investigator of 4 spaceflight GPS and formation flying experiments including the AMSAT-OSCAR-40 GPS experiment, investigating the use of GPS above the constellation. His hobbies include astronomy, amateur radio, and flying. He's the founder of ARISS-USA, which enables amateur radio on the ISS. ------ Rosalie White is an ARISS-US Delegate to the International Space Station (supported by NASA) Her specialties are STEM, Aerospace, NASA, Amateur Radio, and Aviation. " ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “Getting on the air with Amateur Radio Satellites” Tom Schuessler, N5HYP Tom will provide an introduction to what you need to know to become active on FM satellites and beyond. "Tom was licensed in 1985. Although he was aware of amateur radio space communications, he thought it was just too far beyond the means of the average ham JOe. In 2009, he caught the bug from the late Keith Pugh, W5IU. The realization that he already had a radio that would work with the then existing FM satellites was all he needed. He now not only actively enjoys communicating through the current fleet of Amateur Radio satellites, but loves to communicate his passion and experience to those who have never yet experienced the thrill. Professionally, Tom Has worked in the broadcast television and video fields as a production and systems engineer. " ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “Remote Labs for P4XT Engineering Development” Paul Williamson, KB5MU Open Research Institute has equipped two labs for remote development of FPGA-based wideband digital systems such as ORI’d P4XT Multiplexing Transponder program.. Paul will report on Equipment selection, Remote access techniques, and Lessons learned in the first months of operation. Remote developers invited! Amateur radio sparked Paul's interest in electronics and led to a career in digital design and software, specializing in communications and embedded systems, such as Qualcomm's CDMA cellular telephones. He believes in open source collaboration. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “Solving the ITAR and EAR problem for the Amateur Radio Satellite Service” Michelle Thompson W5NYV The regulatory framework for communications satellites has carve-outs for open source and public domain work. Recent successful regulatory efforts have resulted in landmark improvements for the amateur radio satellite service work. Come hear the good news! This talk will have breaking news about regulatory results for the amateur radio satellite service. Michelle Thompson has an MSEE in Information Theory, is co-founder & current CEO of Open Research Institute, is a senior member of IEEE, life member of ARRL, AMSAT, and won the 2018 Don Hilliard Award for service to the amateur satellite community. " ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The final session is a moderated panel discussion and Q&A. Following the panel discussion is our Around the World Scavenger Hunt social event. Join your fellow participants in a fun and exciting Around the World online scavenger hunt from Watson's Adventures! Unwind from a day of presentations and exhibits, make new friends, and see amazing and beautiful places, all from the comfort of home. Thank you, and please welcome our first speaker.

I'm fully interested in this and working on a concept of a version of this for general electronics/ embedded systems/sensors

Transcript of Introductory remarks: Greetings all, Welcome to the Open Research Institute Remote Labs Equipment Review. Open Research Institute (ORI) is a non-profit research and development organization which provides all of its work to the general public under the principles of Open Source and Open Access to Research. Remote Labs are two physical lab benches. They have equipment for advanced digital communications design work. This equipment will be accessible online to anyone, anywhere that wants to work on open source amateur radio satellite service or open source amateur radio terrestrial engineering development. The primary focus of the equipment list reviewed today is to support the design, verification, and test of the DVB family of links. DVB-S2, S2X, and T2 are all commonly found in amateur radio. DVB-S2X is the protocol family used by Phase 4 Ground and Space. Remote Labs is a part of an extremely important process of re-establishing free and open international collaboration with groups such as AMSAT-DL, JAMSAT, and AMSAT-UK, and to increase and amplify collaboration with Libre Space and other open source groups. This is possible for ORI to do by using the open source carve-outs in the US export control regulatory framework. These controls have impeded international cooperation on amateur satellite work for a long time. A significant amount of regulatory relief was achieved over the summer by ORI for amateur radio satellite work, and more work is going on right now to build upon this success. Please see the Open Research Website news section for more details on that. Today's discussion is not about satellite technology, but about the equipment and resources required. We are fortunate to have the advice and input of people that make a living by using remote labs at work. The advice received so far has been heard and acted upon. Python, HTML5 plus Javascript, and command line access will be the initial methods upon to provide secure access to the equipment. We will not be writing or using a heavy or complex software framework for the Remote Lab. We will be authorizing and authenticating users. It is highly likely that we will use the same authentication and authorization approach that we intend to use for payload communications access, in order to get more experience with that design. In other words, you may be authenticated and authorized for Remote Labs the same way that you will be authenticated and authorized for the payload communications system. We will definitely be documenting how to use the lab. We will be responsive to feedback about accessibility and ease of use. There will be someone physically present at the Remote Labs. The equipment is not installed in racks at an unattended site. If a function needs on-site setup, or a test plan can only be done with someone physically at the bench, then that's how the work will be done. Remote Labs is offered as a community resource. Therefore, the review process must include community feedback. Thank you for your time here today to discuss and review the equipment list. As an example, Thomas Parry has provided the following feedback. 1) The initial list had no power supply listed. 2) A computer controlled coax switch matrix would be very useful to control where the signals are going between test gear, DUT, etc. without physical intervention 3) Some form of general purpose digital/low frequency IO device like an analog discovery would be pretty useful for controlling things remotely 4) A way to get arbitrary RF in and out of the PC, ie. an SDR, would be very useful 5) And please remember cabling. Wally Ritchie responded with an updated list that includes coax relays controlled from a USB relay board(s), and the other items. Our practice will be validate and measure any cables we make in-house, buy, or obtain as surplus or donations. I can answer your questions about budget, operation, and policy at the close of the review, or via email. Please welcome Wally Ritchie who will lead todays Remote Labs Equipment Review.

Awesome job folks!!

Well done, ORI!