Red Pitaya T&M board to be sold by RS

The board, which has received phenomenal support from the wider engineering community following a successful Kickstarter funding campaign in 2013, packs an Xilinx Zynq SoC, oscilloscope, arbitrary waveform generator, PID controller and various other digital I/O functions, all at an affordable price point. Red Pitaya is based on the GNU/Linux operating system and can be programmed at different levels using a variety of software interfaces, including: HDL, C/C++, scripting languages, and HTML-based web interfaces. The ultimate goal, according to its developers, is to make instrumentation open and accessible to a much wider cross-section of users. Indeed, priced at $500 (approx. £300), the board is significantly cheaper than the expensive laboratory equipment it aims to replace. "Red Pitaya is a truly innovative idea that is set to transform the test and measurement space," said Philip Dock, global head of product and supplier management at RS. "It is a compact and powerful building block for T&M applications, yet with a price tag of less than $500 it will be the first instrumentation product to hit the market that is accessible to the masses. "It is exciting to be involved in the inaugural product launch, as sole distributor, and we really cannot emphasise enough the impact it is going to have on the lives of anyone interested in this field, whether as a low cost replacement for use by experienced professionals, or as a teaching tool for budding engineers."