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Problem with booting and communication with the UART adapter

eduardoibarra-medel

Hi all

 

Maybe it's just a small detail that is missing but I don't know how to solve it exactly. I’m trying to communicate my laptop with my ZedBoard but for some reason, it suddenly stops. I follow the procedure indicated in instructions included with the ZedBoard package and are also indicated in this tutorial. I download the USB to UART adapter driver (controller version 3.13.0.59) by Cypress which controls the USB serial port (in this case COM9). The device is identified as Cypress-USB2UART-Ver1.0G. The settings form COM9 are like the figures:

 

image

 

When I turn on the ZedBoard with the SD Card boot configuration, my laptop detects the new device, the green power led turns on (LD13), a few seconds later the DONE blue led turns on (LD12) and the MI07 led turns on (LD9) but later it turns off and at the end the LD11 flicker for a few second. In the TeraTerm terminal appears the instructions and commands which indicates that the booting starts but it stops at line [    1.130000] (see image).

 

image

 

 

I tried to start the communication through Matlab using the command:

 

hdlsetuptoolpath('ToolName','Xilinx Vivado','Toolpath','D:\Vivado\2019.1\bin\vivado.bat');

 

And next, to communicate with the ZedBoard I used the instruction z = zynq which show the following error message:

 

Error using codertarget.zynq.internal. LinuxShell/setupZynqHardware (line 574). The serial port, COM9, is not available. Check that you have selected the correct serial port and that no other program is using COM9 and repeat this step.

 

Error in codertarget.zynq.internal.LinuxShell (line 212) obj.setupZynqHardware(username,password,remotedir);

 

Error in zynq (line 113)     h = codertarget.zynq.internal.LinuxShell('ZC702', varargin{:});

 

I really don’t know what exactly is going on, the error indicates that’s probably a driver issue, but I checked the drivers and it seems that all was installed correctly, and they are the proper versions. Maybe, the problem could be from the SD card files, which are back-up files that I downloaded from the Digilen webpage additional resources in the zip file named “zedboard_oob_design.zip”.

 

How we can check if the SD card files are ok? If the problem is in the drivers so, what is the proper driver version which works in this case? I’m using Windows 10, 64 bits, processor x64, with Matlab R2019b and Vivado 2019.1

 

For Matlab with FPGA applications, I have the following toolboxes: Embedded Coder, HDL Coder, and HDL Verifier.

 

Please I really need help with this issue, I cannot finish my project if I cannot communicate with the card with the UART.

  • Hi there,

     

    You should really head over to Digilent's forum for help with this.  There is a much wider audience with experience with this and ultimately you will probably have better success with getting to the bottom of this over there.

    That being said, from what you wrote, if TeraTerm is open when you try to have MatLab access it, that will tie up COM9 and you will get an error like you indicated.

     

    If you want to just check that the terminal is working, use the ZYNQ OOB images, boot it up and you should see stuff on the terminal as you already indicated.  Just from what you wrote, I do not think that it is the ZedBoard.  If there was a problem, you would see garbage or nothing at all in TeraTerm.  After you check the terminal's operations, you can close TeraTerm and use that COMPORT as is in any program.  I cannot recall if ZedBoard needs you to log in or not, so watch that as well.  Also, if you are using the OOB SDCARD image, I do not think that is the case - that design has been pretty solid for many years and many 100's of 1000's of people have used that same design over those years. 

     

    I've never personally used MatLab with a ZedBoard, but again, you will likely have better success asking about the ZedBoard at Digilent's forums.

     

    --Dan

  • in reply to drozwood90

    Hi Drozwood90,

     

    I repeated the procedure but now without the MatLab connection, and the behavior is the same, the booting stop in line 1.13000. Checking the headers when I try to boot the system in the TeraTerm terminal I found this:

     

    ** Unable to read "ramdisk8M.image.gz" from mmc 0:1 **

     

    It is, supposedly, an error from the SD card files but, as you tell before, these files form the OOB SDCARD image, and none reports problems with that. I repeat the procedure with the Matlab terminal without the TeraTerm console in order to avoid port collisions and now the error indicated was a conflict with the USB-to-UART port drivers, in specific, indicates that cannot connect to “zynq hardware”. I’m going to publish this in the Digilent’s forum, maybe someone faced this before and found the solution. Thanks for your recommendations.

     

    --Eduardo

  • Hi there,

     

    I was thinking on this some, what SDCARD are you using?  And can you try to re-image it?

    I hope I am not misleading you, since maybe the MatLab program needs some other files that are not part of the OOB.

     

    --Dan

  • in reply to drozwood90

    Hi there

     

    I used the SD CARD which was included with the zedboard, but somehow it didn't work, when I tried to do the procedure with the teraterm terminal nothing happened, even the blue led never turned on. I made a backup of the original files and rewrite the SD CARD with the new files with the corresponding formatting (FAT32).

     

    Regards

    Eduardo.

  • in reply to eduardoibarra-medel

    Hi there,

     

    Can you check your boot jumpers?  Make sure they are correct.  If the SDCARD is fat32 and the boot.bin and image.ub files are present there is no reason this wouldn't work.

     

    --Dan