The Collaboration for Astronomy Signal Processing and Electronics Research (CASPER): Lowering barriers to entry in radio astronomy research with open-source, community-driven digital signal processing hardware and software

For over a decade the Collaboration for Astronomy Signal Processing and Electronics Research (CASPER) has been providing open-source FPGA-based hardware, programming tools, and reference designs to enable the wide-ranging scientific endeavors of the Radio Astronomy research community. Originally set up to develop the technological capabilities of UC Berkeley's Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) group, today CASPER's stated goal is “to streamline and simplify the design flow of radio astronomy instrumentation by promoting design reuse, through the development of platform-independent, open-source hardware and software.”