OK, the board finally arrived, although a day later than expected, due to Hurricane Michael, fortunately the storm hit quite a bit to the west of me, so I am not dealing with hurricane aftermath.
This was a nice little guide to the board that was inside the package.
Lab exercise:
The first lab exercises mostly revolved around getting familiar with the vivado tools, as well a a customized version of Eclipse. We were brought into a Block Design configuration screen which allows us to connect peripherals in the ARM Cortex-A9 processor.If you look at the diagram below, you can see a check mark next to UART 1 in the green I/O Peripherals section:
This will, as expected, connect the UART 1 peripheral to the processor, allowing us to access it programmatically.
Once that connection is made, we can configure the memory and clocks for the device, validate the design, generate the HDL and export to the SDK, which is the Eclipse editor that is part of the tools installation.
The first example is a simple Hello World example, which because of the power of this board is not just a blinky application, but a print of "Hello World" to the UART that we configured earlier.
We compile the program and flash using the USB cable connected to the JTAG port on the board.
And, if everything is configured properly, you should get
Notice above I'm connected to /dev/ttyUSB1, when the board is plugged into my linux system, it enumerates 2 serial devices, /dev/ttyUSB0 and /dev/ttyUSB1.
/dev/ttyUSB0 appears to be the USB realization of the JTAG port, while /dev/ttyUSB1 is the UART1 connection we configured earlier.
So, this concludes all the way through Lab 2.
So far, we've gotten an introduction to the board and the installed processor, an introduction on the Vivado tools and the SDK tool.
How to configure a peripheral on the device and set the clocks for the memory.
How to flash the device using the JTAG port.
How to access the serial console and read debug messages.
All in all, not a bad first session. I'll post again as I get through more of the labs.
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