Quick Start

System Requirements

• Review the WARPLab 7 System Requirements

Setting up the WARPLab 7 Framework

1. Download the latest WARPLab Reference Design Release (Download) and unzip it to a location of your choosing.
2. Open MATLAB and change the current path to the M_Code_Reference directory from the downloaded archive.
3. Run wl_setup on the MATLAB command line.
4. Follow the prompts to configure your WARPLab environment.

Hardware Setup

• For your PC:
  1. Assign one of your NICs to the manual IP address specified in the wl_setup step above (default 10.0.0.250)
  2. Connect the NIC to a 1Gb Ethernet switch
• For WARP v3 nodes:
  1. Connect ETH_A to the 1Gb Ethernet switch your PC is connected to.
  2. Set the user DIP switch to a unique value on each node, starting at 0
  3. Configure the FPGA with the Reference Design. The reference bitstreams are included in the Bitstreams_Reference folder from the downloaded archive. Find the bitstream appropriate for your hardware and program the .bit file to the board using the Xilinx iMPACT tool. The .bin file can be used to configure an SD card with the design (see the SD config howto for help using the .bin file).
     1. On boot each node will display its node ID on the right hex display
     2. The bottom green LED will blink until the Ethernet link is up
     3. All four green LEDs will blink when the node is ready to accept commands from MATLAB

Examples

1. Confirm everything is ready by copying and pasting the following lines to the MATLAB command line:

   clear
   N = 1;
   nodes = wl_initNodes(N);
   wl_nodeCmd(nodes,'identify');
   disp(nodes)
   

Note: N can be changed to the number of nodes in your network. When you run these lines of code, you should see the User I/O LEDs on your N nodes blink as a result of the identify? command. Additionally, you should see your nodes object vector print status messages to the screen. For N = 2, your status display should be similar to:

Displaying properties of 2 wl_node objects:
|  ID |  WLVER |  HWVER |    Serial # |  Ethernet MAC Addr |
------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 |  7.0.0 |      3 |  W3-a-00027 |  40-D8-55-04-20-36 |
------------------------------------------------------------
|   1 |  7.0.0 |      3 |  W3-a-00041 |  40-D8-55-04-20-52 |
------------------------------------------------------------

2. If the previous stepped work, you should now try one of the M-Code Examples?.

Tips

MATLAB Object Oriented Syntax

Throughout the WARPLab MATLAB code, you will see a mix of equivalent ways of calling methods to various objects. Suppose you have an object obj in your workspace and that object has a method method. You can call this method in two completely equivalent ways:

obj.method()

or

method(obj)

As a more concrete example, consider the quick start step above that called the command wl_nodeCmd(nodes,'identify');. An equivalent way of issuing this command to the nodes in the network is nodes.wl_nodeCmd('identify');

Jumbo Frames

The WARP hardware design supports Ethernet packets up to 9000 bytes. Any Ethernet packet larger than 1500 bytes is considered a "jumbo frame" and support for these jumbo frames among consumer NICs and switches is limited. To see if your hardware supports jumbo frames, increase the MTU setting on your computer to the maximum allowed setting. Then, two tests can determine the maximum usable payload: (a) a ping test, and (b) a WARPLab test.

Ping Test

Once the MTU on your machine is raised to its maximum, you can use pings from your computer to determine whether your switch and NIC can actually send and receive jumbo frames. Make sure you have a board configured with the WARPLab bitstream and a DIP switch of '0' (making its IP address 10.0.0.1).

Windows: Open the command line 'cmd.exe' and type the following:

>ping -l 9000 10.0.0.1

This will send 9000 byte pings to the boards. If the board responds, Windows will tell you how many bytes were actually returned. For example, we receive the following using one of our PCs:

Pinging 10.0.0.1 with 9000 bytes of data:
Reply from 10.0.0.1: bytes=8984 (sent 9000) time=3ms TTL=32
Reply from 10.0.0.1: bytes=8984 (sent 9000) time=3ms TTL=32
Reply from 10.0.0.1: bytes=8984 (sent 9000) time=3ms TTL=32
Reply from 10.0.0.1: bytes=8984 (sent 9000) time=3ms TTL=32

This shows the 8984 bytes were returned.

Linux/OSX: Open a terminal and type the following:

WARPLab Test

Known Compatible Hardware

Known Partially Compatible Hardware

Known Incompatible Hardware

pnet Toolbox

By default, WARPLab will use built-in java routines for performing network I/O. pnet, a custom UDP mex toolbox for matlab, is also supported, but the latest version is required. pnet can offer modestly higher performance than the built-in java routines, but the usage of WARPLab is otherwise identical. Note: these performance gains are negligible for jumbo frame packets near 9000 bytes on length. If you want to use pnet, please perform the following steps:

1. Install the updated pnet IP/UDP toolbox for MATLAB
   1. Checkout the source from /PlatformSupport/pnet (or svn co http://warpproject.org/svn/WARP/PlatformSupport/pnet)
      • The repository contains a compiled binary for Windows 7 64-bit
      • For other platforms, compile the pnet mex function
   2. Add the pnet folder to your MATLAB path. The pnet folder should contain pnet.m and th pnet.mex binary (i.e. pnet.mexw64)
   3. Verify pnet is recognized by running pnet('version'); on the MATLAB command line. The output should print the version number.
   4. Re-run the wl_setup? function in M_Code_Reference. The final prompt will be to select which type of transport you want to use. If you have added a compatible, compiled pnet to your path, the script will list it as an option you can select. Note: simply re-running 'wl_setup' and selecting java is sufficient for switching back to the built-in java routines. You do not need to explicitly remove pnet from your MATLAB path.