jks

We're talking about people who manually update/upgrade the underlying Debian/Linux system on the Kiwi by logging into the Beagle as root and running, for example, the "apt" command. Please don't do this. We only validate specific Debian distributions. If you update manually you run the risk of "bricking" your Kiwi server. That is, downloading something causing an unexpected side-effect which prevents the Kiwi server from running. This will stop further auto-updates and will require a manual intervention to fix. Possibly by re-flashing your Beagle using the Seeed SD-card and losing your entire Kiwi configuration (unless you've backed up).

This is exactly what has happened since a change was made in late February by one of the Beagle developers that made its way into the Debian update stream. We've identified the problem and have asked them to make a change. But it is not clear when this might happen. If you have a Kiwi in this condition then please use the following workaround:

Symptom: The Kiwi server won't stay running. The log shows it just crashes and restarts over and over again with the error "SYS_PANIC: open spidev".

Workaround:

I think the majority of Kiwi owners struggle just to get the supplied antenna near a window, let alone outside and up high. Anything we can do to increase the percentage of Kiwis with functioning GPS would be very useful (e.g. more candidate Kiwis to participate in direction finding experiments). Plus they benefit from automatic, accurate frequency calibration of the SDR.

I don't know much about HF-DF / triangulation, but fortunately we have a Kiwi user that does. He's already got it working! See: http://hcab14.blogspot.com

If you look carefully at the free version of the DUC/DDC compiler provided with Vivado you'll see that it is not general purpose. It is targeted to the cell phone industry (LTE/CDMA) and does not have the bit widths, clock rates and decimation factors needed by the Kiwi.

The Kiwi does take advantage of some Vivado IP blocks, like the DDS compiler. And it makes very heavy use of the Artix DSP blocks to save FPGA fabric gates. We also wanted to have a design fully independent of any FPGA manufacturer's architecture in case we need to change devices in the future. It was also a learning experience for us to implement everything from first principles.

If you look carefully at the free version of the DUC/DDC compiler provided with Vivado you'll see that it is not general purpose. It is targeted to the cell phone industry (LTE/CDMA) and does not have the bit widths, clock rates and decimation factors needed by the Kiwi.

The Kiwi does take advantage of some Vivado IP blocks, like the DDS compiler. And it makes very heavy use of the Artix DSP blocks to save FPGA fabric gates. We also wanted to have a design fully independent of any FPGA manufacturer's architecture in case we need to change devices in the future. It was also a learning experience for us to implement everything from first principles.