[Skimmertalk] red pitaya, for real?

[kazeringue at aol.com]

I'd love to put better hardware to use, but that's not a viable option. 
Shoehorning phat software onto thin hardware kept the beans and rice on 
the table, so not a new problem.  The challenge is part of the fun. 
Just that the latest priority money pit is a Jeep cherokee rebuild. 
Just dropped in a remanufactured engine.  Had that budgeted as a 2017 
expense, but the cracked head overheating finally convinced me to move 
that forward.

With ordinary CW skimmer I found that CPU demand could be tuned to a 
useful extent by limiting the number of decoders, or modifying the 
bandwidth.  This is with a box(or boxes) dedicated to the skimmers.

With dual core boxes with no hyperthreading(just 2 threads),  getting 
three individual softrock based skimmers running is practical by 
limiting the number of decoders by band, and limiting the band via a 
customized band plan.  Running two skimmers per box was more stable and 
allowed better load balancing by band.

The penalty is fewer spots, but that penalty is less than I expected. 
The softrocks and RFI are more of a limitation than the brain challenged 
CPU's.

That might be less possible with an SDR on Skim server.  It looks like 
the only adjustable variables are the number of bands, bandwidth, number 
of decoders, and number of threads.  Of those bandwidth and number of 
decoders appear to apply to all active bands, so a bit less configurable 
than a group of single band skimmers.  Limiting the number of threads 
should keep it throttled on a multi core box.

Its been a couple of years since I played with it though.  Thats still a 
lifetime in CPU upgrades.  Looked at building a box with an AMD cpu with 
8 cores when they came out, but the newer i7's are faster.  Neeed Moar 
Reeseearchh....

The next i7 I buy is gonna replace this now ancient 6 year old email 
box.  Need an upgrade for running virtual boxes for other linux and XP toys.

The Red Pitaya might get more use as test gear if the current skimmer 
CPU can't hack it.  Might have a 'loaner' ELAD for temporary skim use 
soon.

73 de w4kaz