Well I had to spend a week on-site with a customer and another week at a trade show; but I'm back!
I'm happy to report that I got Vivado 2017.4 installed. I followed the instructions in this "experiment" to install the dev environment... although I was a little worried why Xilinx considers installing software an experiment...
I started by creating an account on the Xilinx website. It was a little tricky since they don't trust the apostrophe in my last name... The story of my life...
And for some reason, even the US Government gets involved and they didn't like it either.
At least if they ever try to find James Ogorman, then they'll never find me 
Lab 0 is just about downloading and installing and it overall goes pretty quick.
There are also some accompanying videos for each lesson. We are doing Hardware training (as opposed to the available software training package) so the first video is an introduction to the hardware.
I learned about how the SoC (System On Chip) is a combined FPGA and ARM Processor. This gives it the benefit of hardware-based speed for recurring tasks like video stream processing and an ARM processor which can run a full-blown operating system like Linux; all in one. This also can mean lower overall power consumption on a device since it is a single chip and they are also advertising this as a less hackable piece of hardware since it is all in one.
I'm on to the next lesson but wanted to get this quick post out there so I don't fall too far behind on this quick training program!
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