Path II Programmable Week 1

I was amazed at the huge amount of lesson material associated with Path II Programmable.  I ended up with around 10GB in 18 zip archives.  As I mentioned in my earlier blog, the training program is a combination of 3 Avnet Ultra96 courses.  With all this material it would have been nice to have an overview document that provided a roadmap of how to navigate the course and a list of all the course material.  To be fair, the documentation is very good and it just takes some studying to figure out what to do.

So, here is how I mapped out my approach to the training:

Training Plan

1. Verify hardware functionality
2. Install Design tools and environment
3. Complete MPSoC HW lectures and labs
4. Complete MPSoC SW lectures and labs
5. Complete MPSoC PetaLinux lectures and labs

This is a lot of stuff to do and I'll admit that the first week has been challenging primarily because setting up the design environment has been very time consuming.  Here's a quick overview of my progress....

Verify hardware functionality

I used the Ultra96-V2 Getting Started Guide to setup and test the hardware.  There is an example design image http://avnet.me/ultra96-v2-oob  that I downloaded and burned to the included 16GB microSD card.  The image provides a basic Linux OS and a webserver with application examples.  After booting from the SD card I was able to get a serial connection and log in to the board via the JTAG/UART pod using putty.   The example also creates a WiFi access point to connect to the board but I wasn't able to get that to work reliably with my iPad.  I changed the setup to connect to the access point on my LAN and that worked fine.  I verified that I could get an SSH connection over TCP and then I connected to the on-board webserver and ran the example program to toggle the user LEDs by controlling the GPIO from the web program.  A short video is included below.

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Path II Programmable Week 1

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Install Design tools and environment

For the Avnet courses the Xilinx design tools are installed in a Virtual machine (VM) running on Windows.  There is a large (59 page) instruction guide for doing the tool installation.  The course uses Ubuntu Linux 16.04 as the VM operating system and Xilinx Version 2018_3 design tools.  Much of the installation requires making fixes to the Ubuntu 16.04 environment to work with the Xilinx tools and the VM.  There is a later version of Ubuntu (18.04) and of the Xilinx design tools (2019_1) but I have just had a bad experience with an ARM course with the course materials not matching the hardware and design tool versions and I decided that even though the new versions might fix a lot of problems that it is better to deal with known issues rather than trying to figure out new ones.

The installation took me probably 6-8 hours over a couple of days.  The files associated with the VM, OS, and design tools are very large and took a few hours to download.  The VM installation was straightforward but I was surprised at the hardware resource requirement for the VM to accommodate the design environment.   I have a number of Windows 10 computers but none that would be optimum for this task so I've got my fingers crossed that I'll be able to get through all the labs and the project.  Installing Ubuntu in the VM was straightforward also.  Installation of the Xilinx tools was more of an effort but the documentation is comprehensive and there were a few glitches but mainly just a bunch of effort.

HW lectures and labs

So, now I'm on to the actual training.  I'm probably somewhat behind since there are only 3 weeks left to complete the training.  I've gone through the first 4 lectures and I'm working on the second lab.  The course material is very good and I'm looking forward being able to implement a project.