This is my first blog in the Path to Programmable III Contest. This is going to be my first big journey toward the FPGA world. I have a master's degree in electrical & electronic engineering but I never practically worked with FPGA seriously. I have only very basic knowledge of FPGA and tried with only an out-of-the-box demo of a Xilinx FPGA development board. Working with FPGA is hard and even harder for beginners like me. So, undoubtedly I started a rough ride and in the next few blogs, I will share my good and bad experiences of this ride. I want to start with the MiniZed board with my mini knowledge. Thanks to Element14 and AMD for choosing me as one of the sponsored challengers and sending me the MiniZed Board. Before entering the path let's unbox the MiniZed board first.
Unboxing the MiniZed
This is the result of the first iteration of unboxing. Hope the MiniZed Kit is inside the green box.
The second iteration completed. Still, MiniZed is not visible. Rather I can see a micro USB cable with some paper manual.
After entering inside of the packet of the micro USB cable I discovered three jumpers. I am not sure yet where I will use those. The micro USB cable is 1 meter long. More than enough for using with laptop. But you may need to use extension cable if you use desktop and the CPU is under the table like me.
The third iteration is done. All the treasures are shown in the photo.
The last iteration. The appealing black MiniZed board is now completely visible. It is decorated with lots of nice silicon chips.
The MiniZed is not so mini either in terms of size or power! In height it is almost similar to Arduino but a bit fatter than Arduino UNO.
All the organs of the MiniZed are marked in the figure below.
This is inside the MiniZed
Setting up the Software Environment
There are two parts to a design using any Xilinx development FPGA board: the base hardware design in Vivado and the software project in either Vitis or PetaLinux. So, we need to install Vivado, Vitis and PetaLinux in our computer. Vivado & Vitis works in both Windows and Ubuntu OS but PetaLinux only works with Ubuntu. I am going to install all these tools in my fresh Ubuntu 22.04 machine which I prepared for this purpose. You can use Ubuntu virtual machine inside your Windows machine if you have enough storage.
I installed the latest version of Vivado & Vitis in my machine. Current latest version is 2023.1. This installation guide by Whitney Knitter on hackster.io helped me to successfully install the Vitis as well as PetaLinux.
For Vivado & Vitis 2023.1 you need to install the following dependencies (thanks to abhishek2018 for compiling those together). Keep in mind that installing dependencies is important otherwise you may not be able to install Vitis successfully.
sudo apt install libncurses5 sudo apt install libtinfo5 sudo apt install libncurses5-dev sudo apt install libncursesw5-dev sudo apt-get install libtinfo-dev sudo apt-get install libncurses-dev sudo apt-get install gitk sudo apt-get install libdpkg-perl sudo apt-get install git-gui sudo apt-get install libstdc++6 sudo apt-get install libusb-dev sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-0 sudo apt-get install libc6-dev-i386 sudo apt-get install dpkg-dev sudo apt-get install libegl-mesa0 sudo apt-get install libegl1-mesa sudo apt-get install libgbm1 sudo apt-get install python3-apport sudo apt-get install fxload sudo apt-get install build-essential sudo apt update
After following the guidelines provided by Whitney Knitter and with the updated dependencies list by abhishek2018 I was successfully able to install and run the Vitis 2023.1 in my Ubuntu 20.04 machine.
For installing PetaLinux 2023.1 I followed the same guide and this time I installed the following dependencies.
sudo apt-get install iproute2 sudo apt-get install gawk sudo apt-get install gcc sudo apt-get install net-tools sudo apt-get install ncurses sudo apt-get install zlib sudo apt-get install openssl sudo apt-get install flex sudo apt-get install bison sudo apt-get install libselinux1 sudo apt-get install xterm sudo apt-get install autoconf sudo apt-get install libtool sudo apt-get install texinfo sudo apt-get install zlib1g sudo apt-get install gcc-multilib sudo apt-get install build-essential sudo apt-get install automake sudo apt-get install screen sudo apt-get install pax sudo apt-get install libstdc++6 sudo apt-get install g++ sudo apt-get install python3-pip sudo apt-get install xz-utils sudo apt-get install cpp-9 sudo apt-get install patch sudo apt-get install python3-git sudo apt-get install python3-jinja2 sudo apt-get install python3-pexpect sudo apt-get install diffutils sudo apt-get install debianutils sudo apt-get install iputils-ping sudo apt-get install libegl1-mesa sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2-dev sudo apt-get install python3 sudo apt-get install cpio sudo apt-get install tftpd-hpa sudo apt-get install gnupg
The PetaLinux 2023.1 was successfully installed without any problem.
This is the end of this blog.