TL;DR: I am now able to inject a swept sine and measure a transfer function with python on my Red Pitaya! Attached is a Bode plot for a swept sine from 1 - 30 MHz, going through a band pass filter of 9.5 - 11.5 MHz.

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• Spent too long trying to get pyRPL to work, do not recommend. The code on their website has a lot of problems (like syntax-error level problems), and is ultimately designed to open up and start a GUI, which is not what I want even if it did work.
• Found some code on the git repository of someone at Delft University of Technology, worked better but still not great (oscilloscope/spectrum analyzer functions were alright, but couldn't successfully run a VNA with it, and overcomplicated). Helped me figure out appropriate decimation factors. Realized it was not using the FPGA to get TF data but instead just collecting a lot of time trace data and then taking an FFT in the code to get the TF, which wasn't ideal.
• Eventually switched to using the Red Pitaya SCPI server to talk to the Red Pitaya myself, successful! I inject a swept sine with a for loop that just cycles through frequencies and takes the transfer function at each one.
  • Was originally getting the transfer function by using scipy.signal.csd() and scipy.signal.welch() to get Pxy and Pxx and dividing, and then just finding the closest point in the frequency spectrum to the frequency I was inserting.
  • Switched to doing IQ demodulation myself: where x(t) is the measurement before the band pass filter and y(t) is the measurement after, taking the mean of (x(t) * cos(2pi*freq)) = a1, mean(x*sin()) = a2, mean(y*cos()) = b1, mean(y*sin()) = b2, and then TF(freq) = (b1 + i b2)/(a1 + i a2).
  • Unfortunately still taking time trace data and then calculating the TF instead of using the FPGA, but I have not found anything online indicating that people are able to get VNA capabilities on the Red Pitaya without collecting and sending all the time trace data... I'm still not sure if that's actually a Red Pitaya capability yet.

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To do:

• Will go take measurements of the AUX laser loop with the RPi! Have a good diagram of when I did it with the SR785 so it shouldn't be too hard hopefully.
• Figure out how to get coherence data!!
• Figure out how to get the RPi on the wifi. Right now I'm just plugging the RPi into my computer. Paco and I were working on this before and had trouble finding old passwords... Hopefully will not be too much of a roadblock.