Build me an Embedded Processing System and I'll Give You a Zynq®︎-7000 SoC ZC702 Evaluation Kit

Hi Randall Scasny,

Autonomous Driving Training Data Generator:

- We can connect CAN bus to vehicle CAN network & we can log the signals(Wheel Speed,Steering Angle,Throttle etc).This data can be used to train the AI algorithm for Autonomous car.

Hi Rajasekaran,

Nice idea, are you thinking of performing some resource intensive processing on the data as well, like implementing the learning algorithm, do the training and generate the model, on the Zynq or just to generate the training data sets?

Fabio

That is a very capable board with a great range of FMC addon boards. As a stand alone system (albeit perhaps with addition of a low-cost PMod card) I would like to see the following built:

Logic and Protocol Analyser.

It could utilise that huge 1GByte of DDR3 RAM to create a circular buffer for a raw data capture or be configured to only record filtered bytes and to time tag them...therefore allowing a much greater capture time.

The stored data could be analysed to several of the main protocols easily e.g. SPI, I2C, UART, CAN. Serial data on a single line or just a few lines would be easiest to build for as it would require less wiring than a parallel capture.

The embedded ARM cores could be utilised to run Linux - to control the faster FPGA Programmable Logic areas of the FPGA and to allow data to be manipulated via the user command lines e.g. they could SSH into this board from any terminal application and run a bespoke script - that script would interface to the registers of the Logic and Protocol Analyser. Functions could be as simple as start/stop and setting up the trigger bytes or sequences of bytes to look for.

It would be a very powerful system - and of course a fun and functional project as any homemade test equipment becomes.

Rod

That's an incredible piece of kit. I don't feel my FPGA skills are up to doing it justice, so I won't be entering.

I hope you can find two people who are able to create something great. It would be a shame if they end up with someone who promises something impressive but has no chance of delivering.

This is a nice looking professional dev kit that could be used as a prototyping tool in a multitude of projects.

Is this a rev 1.0 or a rev 1.1 board?

The difference is that the rev. 1.0 uses Xilinx ISE which is not officially supported on Windows 10 and rev. 1.1 uses Xilinx Vivado which is supported on Windows 10.

The video mentioned that you get a full licence for Vivado included, so I guess it's 1.1.

How about a wideband (multi-channel) spectrum analyzer?

Analog Devices makes SDR boards and even supplies an image for the ZC702 (decimator + interface logic in the FPGA, and Linux + other software on the ARM), and even provides the HDL source. The image allows users to stream data from the RF transceiver to a host PC to a software like GNU Radio/Matlab (via the FPGA + ARM) for processing i.e. implementation of filters or other SDR blocks required for Rx/Tx.

To start with, consider a spectogram (or waterfall plot). Software like GNURadio, Baudline and Inspectrum can be used on the host PC, but the limitation is the bandwidth of the USB 2.0/Ethernet connection, and in many cases the processing power of the host PC - especially when doing a large FFT.

While most of this is usually done in software (for ease of use/flexibility), moving the pre-processing/FFT to the FPGA would be interesting because of the performance benefits (the sampling rate & FFT size will not longer be limited by connection to, & processing power of the host), and instead of streaming the data to the PC, it could be displayed on a monitor or TV using the ZC702's HDMI port. Combine this with a simple control/trigger system (either using UART or a couple of GPIO), it could be designed to capture/stream data to the host only when certain conditions are met eg. a UART transfer to/from a radio module.

I've got access to a FMCOMMS3-EBZ which has a tuning range of 70Mhz to 6 Ghz, and upto 56Mhz of bandwidth, and since the ZC702 has 2 FMC connectors, it might be able to plug in two of these to get >100Mhz of bandwidth.

Although is not from the latest generation, the Xilinx Zynq-7000 SoCs is still really powerful and can be used for compute intensive applications.

I tough to create a (series of) tutorial(s) on:

Hardware Accelerated Image Processing and Machine Learning using Xilinx SDSoC

SDSoC is Xilinx's Software Defined Development platform. It allows targeting FPGA-s without too much hardware knowledge. For example you can easily create hardware (PL/FPGA) accelerated versions C/C++ functions.

Xilinx reVision is a set of hardware accelerated libraries for computer vision (xfOpencv) and machine learning (Caffe).

I want to create some examples for the Zynq-7000 SoC ZC702 Evaluation Kit to demonstrate hardware accelerated:

• image processing algorithms (xfOpenCV) - 2D filters, edge / object detection, etc.
• machine learning algorithms (Caffe) - binary neural networks

Hardware:

Zynq-7000 SoC ZC702 Evaluation Kit

USB Webcam - Logitech C920

HDMI Monitor

Software:

Vivado Design Suite - hardware design

Xilinx SDK IDE - embedded development

Xilinx SDx IDE - software defined development

Xilinx reVision (xfOpencv, Caffe) - hardware accelerated image processing and BNN-s

PetaLinux - Xilinx's Linux Distribution for FPGA based SoC-s

Check out my Stereo Vision and LiDAR Powered Donkey Car project which uses the Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC ZU3EG SBVA484 for hardware accelerated stereo vision.

I agree that's not probably not the latest generation. I was given the two kits by a representative of Xilinx. I took them because I wanted to give some of our members a chance to work with the kit.

Randall

Hi fabio,

It can be done,but i am not familiar in that topics(Machine learning),I have worked with CAN,Data logging and other Embedded stuff.

Initially i had two idea

1)One is the above topic,what i mentioned.

2)I thought of a Gateway(Takes CAN,USB ,UART to ETH) data, vice versa on the all the protocol.