I'm developing a supposed quick and dirty solution for someone and recommended a Red Pitaya rather than build hardware from scratch bearing in mind the short timescales and need to de-risk. I received the device on Friday. I got the board to work fairly quickly, but then to develop on it... not so much.
Here are my thoughts to Red Pitaya.
o Make the unit easily visible through the network with a hostname out of the box, don't rely solely on the end user having to go through hoops (admittedly small, but irritating) just to connect to board. Thank God it has a USB/Serial port.
o The Visual Programming thing doesn't even work... I assume it/s a cloud development system, but I don't know as I click the link and bugger all happens. Tried a few browsers including Chrome, Firefox and IE in Windows and Ubuntu, nothing. The scope didn't work, nothing seemed to want to make the traces do anything other than flatline. The spec an works, but that was it.
o Blinky. FFS, how hard do you have to make this? I've been at it since Friday on and off. It's now Sunday, I reckon I've had about eight hours at this, in between building various Linux versions in VMs to try to make the instructions work. I still can't flash a ****ing LED. Not in Python, not in C. And no, I'm not an academic outfit with cheap Matlab licences. Why can I not get a Blinky to work? the documentation is woefully out of date/wrong/doesn't tell you what versions of what to install. You end up pissing in the wind trying stuff out. I have now found out that they switched from soft floating point to hard floating point making their very very very long Eclipse instructions incorrect. All well and good having detailed instructions, that's appreciated and to be applauded, but when they're wrong because you've deprecated it..... well I think I'll leave it there.
Their web site is all very flashy and whatnot, sadly the content is very broken :-(
True, there are warnings that the instructions are inconsistent since a Sept 2015 release... but we are now five months later.
With regret, as it stands it's hardly for a beginner if you want to use it as a development platform.