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Winners Announced: We're Giving Away Up to 10 Arty-S7 Boards to Use in an Upcoming Xilinx Workshop!

We're Giving Away Up to 10 Boards for Our Upcoming Arty-S7 Workshop!

 

In the Comments Below: Let Us Know Why You Are Interested in the Upcoming Arty 7 Workshop for a Chance to Win!

 

If you're a maker or an engineer who's interested in getting into FPGA, we're making it easier than ever to get started.  We're following up the Getting Started with Xilinx Development Tools webinar and the 3 part Xilinx Workshop: Getting to Know Vivado Series with Adam Taylor with a workshop that let's you use a board compatible with Vivado for your next project.The Arty S7 board features the new Xilinx Spartan-7 FPGA and is the latest member of the Arty FPGA development board family from Digilent. The Arty S7 board features new Xilinx Spartan-7 FPGA and is the latest member of the Arty family for Makers and Hobbyists.  This little dev board is something that we think you will be interested, especially if you've attended our previous Xillinx workshops. It hits a sweet spot of having a relatively low cost ($99 USD) and enough power and connectivity be very useful.

 

There's been a lot of interest in the Vivado Workshop series and Xilinx webinars in general.  We're interested in why you're interested in attending the upcoming workshop and how you plan on using the board.  Reply in the comments below to register your interest so we can arrange to have an Arty 7 board sent to you in time to follow along with our workshop!  You can also purchase an Arty-S7 board as well as the other PMOD Board here:

 

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Buy NowBuy Now

 

Buy NowBuy Now

 

The Spartan-7 FPGA offers the most size, performance, and cost-conscious design engineered with the latest technologies from Xilinx and is fully compatible with Vivado Design Suite versions 2017.3 and newer. Putting this FPGA in the Arty form factor provides users with a wide variety of I/O and expansion options. Use the dual row ArduinoRegistered connectors to mount one of the hundreds of hardware compatible shields available, or use the Pmod ports with Digilent's pre-made Pmod IP blocks for a more streamlined design experience. Arty S7 was designed to be MicroBlaze ready and comes out of the box ready to use with the free Xilinx WebPack licensing with the Vivado Design Suite.

 

Here's a good primer that shows you all the cool things you can do with Arty-S7 board:

 

 

Dates and Register for Free:

 

Workshop:Dates and Time:

Session 1 - Learn about Xilinx FPGAs and Embedded Processing

 

Lecture

  • Why Xilinx FPGAs solve common challenges of ASSPs
  • Xilinx Product Offering
  • Embedded Processing Solutions

Lab

  • Install Xilinx tools

Wednesday, 30th of September 2020

 

11:00 CT / 4:00 PM GMT

 

Session 2 – Building a custom microcontroller in minutes

 

Lecture

  • How to get started using Xilinx Vivado Design Tools
  • Xilinx Example projects jumpstart designs

Lab

  • Launch processor on Arty-S7 and run Hello World

Wednesday, 14th of Oct 2020

 

11:00 CT / 4:00 PM GMT

 

Session 3 – Rapid Sensor Prototyping with Digilent Peripheral Modules

 

Lecture

  • How to expand Xilinx IP catalog with 3rd party IP
  • Leverage IP to build custom interface w/o writing RTL
  • Add prebuilt IP drivers and communicate with sensors
  • Lab
    • Run example design with Arty-S7, MicroBlaze, and PmodNAV

Wednesday, 28th of Oct 2020

 

11:00 CT / 4:00 PM GMT

 

  • Congratulations to , , , , , , , , , and .   You are the winners of the Arty S-7 boards.   We look forward to your blogging your experience with the workshop on the community!

  • Very excited to participate at this upcoming xilinx workshop. It has been a long time that I didn't make an FPGA  project.

    Maybe In the next weeks, we will develop a FPGA Xilinx board and I'm looking forward to work on it.

  • I'm a software developer and have been slowly getting "back to basics" with the foundations of my craft, and I feel that FPGAs would be a great next step to bridge my understanding of how 1's and 0's become the software I work with every day (hint: it's because computers can do it very, very fast).

     

    I have a few friends who do FPGAs as their profession and would like to eventually get the hardware to properly learn from, for future application.

  • I am trying to get started with programmable logic and wish to get started by following through a very condusive workshop, as I realised studying from books wouldn't be much at a certain stage where you need to do handson in order to grasp the actual implications.

     

    I'm hoping that this course will give you a good foundation to get started.

  • This board has just the right amount of PMODs for any image processing project!

  • Digilent’s Arty S7 featuring the Xilinx Spartan-7 FPGA coupled with the 3-part training workshop sound like a great way to explore the world of Xilinx FPGAs.  In my many years as a hardware/software engineer I have occasionally worked on project that have incorporated them but have never had an opportunity to design with them.  I look forward to attending the workshops and hopefully, with any luck, do some programming on the actual dev board.  It would be interesting to see how I could adapt the lessons to a group of high school robotics students.  Thank you for the opportunity.  My fingers are crossed.  Stay safe, stay well.

     

    Regards, Gordon M.

  • in reply to michaelkellett

    The Spartan7 is indeed a child compared to the better ones from Xilinx, but honestly, a FPGA driving a Motor is a bit wasteful, and doesn't sit right with me.

     

    Unless if you use the lowest 10 dollar spartan 7.

  • in reply to michaelkellett

    interesting insight on the CAN controller, i have never try it on FPGA.

     

    In my past employment, we have a subgroup dealing with Xilinx. i used to handle the high level BLDC motor control block with high level tool like MATLAB (now i use Altair Embed as well as just MCU with firmware) while my counterpart translate the high level blocks into verilog to run on spartan 3 (even back then the reference design from Xilinx for BLDC motor control is using zynq). reason to use FPGA is the high speed requirement in BLDC motor control like the field oriented control (block below from ST)

    image

     

    just did a search on xilinx , its BLDC motor is very much still driven by proprietary IP

    https://www.xilinx.com/applications/industrial/motor-control.html

     

    in fact after relooking at the site above i think it still very advanced to try to achieve this with spartan 7, in one of the previous BLDC motor project where we use Renesas MCU, it has a supplier provided FPGA daughterboard just to do data acquisition for 3 phase data visualization. i think this is more achievable. if i were to do this, i will make use of a MCU that can does PMSM off the shelf, like the TI Piccolo with DRV8301 inverter board, and use the arty S7 just to do high speed data acquisition.

     

    having attempted vision on zynq and MPSOC device, i am in the opinion spartan 7 is not suitable for computer vision involving AI.

  • in reply to hugohu

    I think that might rather depend on the kind of motor control you had in mind. The Spartan 7 is a nice enough FPGA but compared with some of Xilinx and Intel/Altera's bigger offerings it's just a baby.

    Like other FPGAs in its class it can do a bit of pattern recognition but not serious neural network stuff.

    In Xlinx's own words:

     

    SpartanRegistered-7 Family: Optimized for low cost, lowest power, and high

    I/O performance. Available in low-cost, very small form-factor

    packaging for smallest PCB footprint.

     

    So reasonably sophisticated motor control might fit it quite well. In recent project we thought the Spartan too weedy for a data acquisition project and used an Artix.

     

    To try and put this into perspective - a CAN controller would use (very roughly) between 25 and 50% of the smallest Spartan 7.

     

    MK

  • in reply to weiwei2

    Spartan 7 is an FPGA, supported by Vitis/Vivado. It's not for easy stuff like motor control, instead it's suitable for AI at the edge. Doing Motor control with such a powerful chip would be a waste. You'd be better off with an Arduino and a Motor control shield.

     

    If you're interested, there is a roadtest currently involving this.