Customers worldwide invited to place orders for new Red Pitaya

RS Components (RS) and Allied Electronics (Allied), the trading brands of Electrocomponents, a high service distributor of electronics and maintenance products, have announced that they are inviting general orders for Red Pitaya, the single-board, open instrumentation and control platform that replaces many laboratory and field instruments at a fraction of the price.

Customers across the globe who previously registered their interest on the Red Pitaya website, and who have been eagerly awaiting availability of the product, were given the opportunity to place a priority order with RS and Allied, which guarantees them delivery of a Red Pitaya board from the first limited production run in May 2014. All other orders are to be fulfilled in strict rotation by RS and Allied on a first-come first-served basis from the initial batch while stocks last, with lead times of up to twelve weeks for the next commercial production.

Red Pitaya is a test and measurement solution offering a unique, compact and low-cost ecosystem approach. It combines a Xilinx Zynq-based hardware platform with an open-source online repository of applications including a waveform generator, oscilloscope and spectrum analyser.

Based on the GNU/Linux operating system, Red Pitaya can be programmed at different levels using a variety of software interfaces, including: HDL, C/C++, and scripting languages. HTML-based web interfaces enable access to Red Pitaya’s functionality in most Web browsers from a smartphone, tablet or personal computer.

A standard set of open-source test and measurement applications is provided in a community open access library known as the Bazaar cloud marketplace. In addition, the Backyard repository hosts open-source development code and tools to enable further development, and to inspire collaboration within the engineering community.

“Red Pitaya has sparked a considerable amount of excitement among engineers in the test and measurement sector,” said Philip Dock, global head of product and supplier management at RS. “No other instrumentation product on the market can offer such functionality and flexibility at a price that is affordable within even the smallest of budgets. We expect to see high demand for the product, so we are encouraging customers to place orders early to secure the fastest delivery.”

“When we launched the Red Pitaya project our vision was to enable everyone to start using technologies that yesterday were available only to advanced research laboratories and industry. Today we are excited about the response from our users and about the creativity of ideas they are proposing. This is the real power of Red Pitaya,” said Borut Baricevic, Red Pitaya co-founder and product manager.