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

Sounds complicated and a lot of work... :-)

Something for the more advanced roadtesters...

Interesting... I can't even open that page because my Firefox (version 57.0.1) is "too old", despite being installed this morning. I was curious about looking into the IDE, but this roadtest clearly isn't for me

FPGA are not the kind of devices you program in software. They are no CPUs or MCUs. These are devices where you can create the hardware you need, and then it interacts with the software on a CPU (e.g. via I2C or SPI or UART). Vivado is the tool you need to program the hardware, and you define your hardware in e.g. Verilog or VHDL (which kind of look like a program, but this is very misleading).

If you never did something like that before (or worked with e.g. the programmable hardware in a Cypress PSoC), then a FPGA roadtest will have a steep learning curve. It could be better to look at the CPLDs from Xilinx (e.g. you can get rather cheap boards with the XC9572XL), which are programmed by Xilinx ISE. And there you can also define your hardware as a schematic which might be easier to understand at the beginning.

Just opened it with FF57, and it worked fine. Any plugins which might cause this (e.g. NoScript)?

hlipka  wrote:

 

FPGA are not the kind of devices you program in software.

Ha ha - so now we get into a deep, philosophical argument about what "software" is ... !!

It is "software" in the sense that you write "source code" in a "language" (eg, VHDL) which gets "compiled" and then loaded into the FPGA to define its operation.

But it is nothing like the kind of software you write to run on a processor.

It is not a sequence of instructions that a processor follows, one after the other; rather, it is a definition of the hardware itself.

You could actually create a processor in the FPGA, and then have that processor run "conventional" software that you write for it...

As already noted, this particular FPGA also has an actual microprocessor ready-made and built-in.

kas.lewis  wrote:

 

Its an FPGA... So no not Arduino or Raspberry Pi. This you need to implement the digital logic.

Actually, it's an FPGA plus a microprocessor (Cortex-A); so that's like having a Raspberry-Pi plus an FPGA - but all in one chip.

everything runs in hardware and not software

Because it is an FPGA plus a Cortex-A, you can have some stuff running in software plus some stuff in the hardware!

The downside is that you have to learn the software development environment plus the hardware development environment plus how to stitch it all together!

None of those is trivial on its own - doing all 3 at once is, as noted, a very large task!

The holiday season is quite busy for me so I'm out.

There's quite a few tutorials and examples here

| Zedboard

along with training videos

Training and Videos | Zedboard

Examples I've seen for these kind of boards are: Software Defined Radio, Accurate Motor and Servo controllers, Video or Audio processing, Signal processing e.g. accelerometers or other rapidly changing signals.

Here's some more examples

Community Projects | Zedboard

Maybe someone that did the other FPGA roadtest (the one that was great for beginners) could do this as a comparison ? That would be one approach I would take but I didn't do the previous roadtest so this in an avenue not available to me.

Kas

rscasny

"cost of entry from a knowledge based perspective"

I'm wondering if that (or some variation) shouldn't be part of the RT scoring.

Obviously some devices are much easier than others, and the supporting documents and programming software can vary the score.

Mark

I don't know about others, but I can tell you why I won't apply to this, even tho I have both the motivation and background to test it.

It may be a good product for some people who want a bunch of functionality out of the box, but it hardly qualifies as a dev board (which is what I usually need). At best, it can be considered a demo board or even a finished product, that makers can use.

As a dev board is of little value, because it only exposes a couple of the IOs, so you can't connect your own circuitry to it. You can only use it as a whole, which is rarely something you want to do (or is even possible) during product development.

To me, given the contradiction between the Arduino header, the complexity of the IC and the lack of IOs, is not even clear who this board is aimed at. Perhaps the target audience should be established first and then explain what this board can do for them.

Regards,

Razvan