If you have been a long-time follower of Element 14 community, The Avnet Board community, and our FPGA forum then you know there has not been a new release of the MiniZed Technical Training Courses (TTC) since 2019. Well, the long awaited update has finally happened. The new 2021.1 Software, Hardware and PetaLinux training courses has now gone live at the Avnet Board Training site.
Don’t be discouraged by the small print, it’s a big deal!
For the past few weeks I’ve been reviewing the latest course and lab material produced by our friends at ADIUVO and the author of the MicroZed Chronicles. They did a great job putting together a step-by-step set of instructions, lectures, and labs to help bring a person new to AMD-Xilinx to a point they can feel comfortable with their tools and design flow. The course is designed to be taken in the order of Software first, then Hardware, and finally PetaLinux. The scope will develop a high-level understanding of the ecosystem that AMD-Xilinx created with their Vitis Core Development tool and Vivado ML Edition, all on the Zynq-7000 MPSoC.
The MiniZed hardware this course was built around is no longer available for purchase, so you should only start this course if you already own the MiniZed board. If you fall into this category, and have never taken the earlier courses, then you will need to procure a TE HTU21D Module as well. For those who do not have a MiniZed stay tuned. There will be two more courses released in 2022 for the Ultra96-V2 and the newly released ZUBoard 1CG .
The TE HTU21 PMOD is a board (PN: DPP301Z000 ) featuring the TE HPP845E03 which senses humidity from 0% to 100% and temperature from 0 to 80oC. During the course, the HTU21 will be used for importing example application code and capture data to a serial console. Then later in the PetaLinux course you will take application code and create a custom application from the make file using text editor. The TE HTU21 PMOD has a wide range of potential applications for multiple markets, and this course will help you get familiar with the product and its uses.
Along with the lessons mentioned previously you will also learn a variety of objectives that will build upon each other to increase your comfort with AMD-Xilinx tools. You learn where to find driver applications from example peripheral folder in the Software Course, understanding power scripting with source from Tcl script in the Hardware Course, and finally in the PetaLinux course you will learn the fundamentals of the PetaLinux Yocto build system. A new user to 2021.1 tools will appreciate how Visit makes a developer’s job easier, understand the development flow and debug embedded systems for all Zynq-7000 programmable SoCs.
To get started with the training there are a few steps that need to be taken to access the course material. The main requirement is to have an account with Element 14. If you have not joined the community, this is a great time to sign up. To register for the first time, follow this link. Once the registration is validated the next step will be to unlock the training area. Earlier I provided the link to the Avnet Board Training site, this is where you find the available courses that will need to be unlocked.
After the site has redirected you to the training material it’s as simple as selecting the Software course,
downloading the Prelab file and start creating you own virtual machine with Ubuntu 18.04. There is an installation guide that we provide to walk a new user through this process, and each lesson has a video that teaches the fundamentals of the lesson. We tried to make everything as first-time-friendly as possible, but if you have any questions, please send us a message through the Forum and we will do our best to support you.
Happy learning!