In Search of RoadTesters to Take On The All Programmable SoC (AVNET MiniZed RoadTest)

rscasny  wrote:

 

I am also working on getting more tutorials of Vivado.

I think this might be very useful to anyone participating.

especially if its taken from the entry level through to something moderately useful.

I watched some youtube z7000 videos on working with vivado and the level of complexity involved in the software is pretty daunting.

Even just to create a simple AND gate required the use of the multiple steps and varying stages as well as a third party website to help

generate some simulation code.  That to me just seems nightmarish to troubleshoot while you try and figure out what the hell you are doing.

My main takeaway from that was, that the vivado application wasn't the only part of the process that you had to become familiar with.

You had to learn other external tools as well.

In my opinion the roadtest for this one is a wolf in sheep's clothing. :-)  Its definitely a worthwhile challenge for someone that has

a significant portion of time to invest in learning the ins and outs of the board and the software infrastructure.

Once you tame that wolf though, you'll be able to do use its power to solve a multitude of design problems / projects.

@ Andy Neil, You are correct in principle but I think a bit light on the time needed - 2 weeks is nothing like enough !

@ Robert - There is  a load of tutorial stuff on Xilinx's website - I didn't have problems with getting information - just that there is so much of it - I think I've mentioned before that, for example, the documentation for the DDR3RAM controller runs to >650 pages - and that's just one tiny part of the chip. To understand this chip and the tools you need to skim thousands of pages of documentation and actually read quite a bit of it.

With regard to the miniZed, to get up and running with the Vivado toolset and get a an FPGA design communicating with the ARM and doing something useful - will take no less than 8 weeks (and that's if you are already a competent FPGA designer). Michael Wylie (above) said it took him three weeks with a similar Altera part to get to a blinking LED !

I've recently (Q1 this year) done the transition form Lattice tools to Xilinx Vivado and it was quite a big jump. Interestingly, I've just done a design (less ambitious) using Altera parts and tools and found the Altera tools a much easier step.

The point of all this is to manage expectations for this road test

In order to get this part or board to a simple useful design will take a skilled pro about £15k - £25k worth of their time - so you are either going to get some one who is kind enough to let you piggy back on an existing project, wait  a year while someone smart and gifted does it in spare time, or get a picture of the cardboard box and a screenshot of the pre-cooked demo running.

To try and put this in perspective - on our own Xilinx transition project (not to Zynq but just a biggish (200kLUT) FPGA) we bought  2 cheap and one less cheap dev board and made 2 custom dev boards. About 25 weeks of work to get to the stage where we can give the go ahead to take it to prototype.

MK

6. Beauty is not a requirement

Oh my God! This Roadtest is for me!!

5. A Wish to Say "Hello World"

Hey, I'm a world expert on Hello world! Seriously, look it up on Wikipedia, I'm cited!

7. A knack for tinkering is preferred

My girlfriend would have a lot of interesting things to say about that... She's getting fed up of receiving evaluation boards at home

ARM? Check! I wrote a book on them! FPGA? Aww, snap. I know absolutely nothing about them, except possibly what the acronym means, and even then, I wouldn't bet on it...

So no, not for me. Shame, I'd love to try it out, but clearly, I'm not the one for this test. Still, sounds like an awesome road test! I look forward to seeing reviews on this one.

It's very tempting as I would love to get more in with FPGAs but, with the steep learning curve, lack of instructional help (FAEs are notoriously unhelpful, they just don't have the time to step you through their product) and the potential lack of time... I don't think I would be able to do any form of justice other than say why I couldn't get this to do anything in 2 months.

Kas

Probably the best resource available is the Zynq Book. The examples will probably need adjusting (since they are for the ZedBoard and the Zybo), but its probably the most comprehensive documentation.

There is also the New Horizons Blog, and the MicroZed chronicles (with more than 200 parts so far...).

Hmm, looking at all this documentation makes me think whether I should apply for this as well...

hlipka  wrote:

...

Hmm, looking at all this documentation makes me think whether I should apply for this as well...

yes please

Randall,

I just browsed a bit through the Zynq book (but it's a lot 484 pages), and I wondered how you use that thing...

Is it like a raspberry pi and can you run python code on it? Or is it more like an Arduino and you'll need an IDE for it? How does this device compare to the previous mentioned platforms?

It looks nice, but up to now I don't know what to do with it.

kind regards,

Reinoud

Its an FPGA... So no not Arduino or Raspberry Pi. This you need to implement the digital logic. Therefore everything runs in hardware and not software making the overall system run alot faster as well as having the ability to run multiple threads truly simultaneously not using time division or anything like that. This is a very different beast. FPGAs powerful, efficient but a whole different world when it comes to programing.

Kas

Disclaimer, this is based om my basic understanding of FPGAs and not from any indepth understanding or usage.

Probably the answer is "yes", Its an FPGA, so you can implement quite a lot of digital logic in it. For example, you can implement an ATMega328 in it (as it was done in the XLR8 project). But since the Zynq also comes with an ARM A9 processor, it can also run Linux. So you can do both (although the typical use case is to run Linux on the ARM core, and then implement whatever digital logic you need on the FPGA part).

I browsed a little further, it seems that you'll need an IDE like tool for it: Vivado.

https://www.xilinx.com/video/hardware/getting-started-with-the-vivado-ide.html

https://www.xilinx.com/support/download.html

But I agree with some others: there's quite a learning curve here...

I guess this is not for me...