Project Description And Upgrade Installation

Blog # 1 - Project Description And Upgrade Installation
Blog # 2 - MiniZed Board Peripheral Configuration and Creating a Boot Image
Blog # 3 - Executing Vivado Design Suite TCL Commands
Blog # 4 - Move Data Between BRAM and DDR3 Memories
Blog # 5 - How to Enable Interrupts With MiniZed
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Hi everyone! My main goal in this challenge is to learn and improve my skills with Vivado and Vitis mainly. I already know something about Vivado, and now I'm migrating to programming with Vitis. I also know how to program in C so I hope to quickly learn about the Vitis platform. Below I show you a brief description of my project, as well as the solution I faced in the software upgrade from Vivado HL Design Edition to Vitis Unified Software Platform.

Building A Balance For Tuning Of Drone Motors

• A PID controller is a control loop feedback mechanism commonly used in industrial control systems. A PID controller continuously calculates an error value e(t) as the difference between a desired setpoint and a measured process variable and applies a correction based on proportional, integral, and derivative terms which give their name to the controller type.
• In my project I will use this mechanism to control two motor in order to calibrate our drone. We will put the motors on a balance and calculate the angle using the Pmod NAV or similar module. Even the accelerometer of the MiniZed board itself would be ideal. So in our case the value that we will control is the inclination angle of our drone. The e(t) error will be the difference between the real angle of the drone and the desired one. The desired one will be 0, which means that the drone is perfectly horizontal.
• So to tune our motors we will first build a balance for just 2 motors. This two motors represent just one axis, in this case will be the x-axis. As you know a drone can move in any of the three axis, x,y and z. All we want to do with this balance is to find our P, I and D constants. Each of this 3 constants will affect in one way or other the entire PID control, and we have to find the best ones. I will make any kind of changes and improvements to my project that I have not mentioned here, and it all depends on the progress that I have, and that I solve the main problems.

Why adjustment or calibration of drone motors is necessary? As we know, all electromechanical parts wear and change their technical specifications, so any damage or wear is enough to decalibrate these devices.

Below I show you the MiniZed gift board. Thanks to the sponsor of the "Path to Programmable III" challenge!

I already have the Ultra96-v2 board, so my collection of quality boards increases.

HARDWARE 

• MiniZed, and
• Pmod Nav or similar accelerometer
• 2 x DC motor
• 2 x drone propeller
• L298N driver or similar

SOFTWARE:

• AMD Vivado Design Suit,
• Vitis, and
• PetaLinux

Can't Launch Vitis IDE

During the training course and after synthesizing, implementing, and generating a bitstream for a Microblaze design in Vivado, I got an error when I tried to start the Vitis IDE. The command sequence is Tools -> Launch Vitis IDE, and all I got was a popup with a message "Vitis IDE launch failed" [OK]. No further information is provided. I was running Windows 10, with Vivado 2021.1 as the tutorial recommends.

I tried with Vitis HLS 2021.1 is installed and can be launched from a command prompt, but nothing there matches anything like the software Vitis IDE examples I've found online. Everything in Vitis HLS seems to be for synthesizing C code into RTL, rather than writing and compiling C code to execute on a Microblaze processor. 

In my Microblaze Vivado project I get all the way through generating the bitstream and exporting the hardware, including the bitstream, and generating the .XSA file.

Solution

Is there a way to launch the the Vitis IDE (not Vitis HLS) other than from Vivado? The error is solved by upgrading the installation from "Vivado HL Design Edition" to "Vitis Unified Software Platform".

By default the window selects everything and indicates the installation of 27 GB approx. In my case I unchecked "Devices" and the installation was reduced to 11 GB with a time of approximately two hours. In summary, it's possible to save time and the update doesn't delete the data of devices if you already have them installed.

To start this update process you just click on Help -> Add Design Tools or Devices

And type your credentials in the next window

This problem is common in new users of Vivado and Vitis, because they install everything by default or because they don't receive recommendations for different installation options. The solution is simple and I hope this can be useful for someone in trouble!