RoadTest: PYNQ-Z2 Dev Board: Python Productivity for Zynq®
Author: ralphjy
Creation date:
Evaluation Type: Development Boards & Tools
Did you receive all parts the manufacturer stated would be included in the package?: True
What other parts do you consider comparable to this product?:
What were the biggest problems encountered?: The Microblaze applications provided did not allow for multiple Grove interfaces simultaneously. But this was per design, so not a fault of the product.
Detailed Review:
The roadtest for the PYNQ-Z2 has been one of my most satisfying roadtest experiences. The product is well documented and it works robustly.
I documented my roadtest in a series of blogs:
The PYNQ-Z2 Dev Kit came with everything that was required to get started immediately including a pre-flashed 16GB microSD card. The Xilinx Zynq 7020 SoC has a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 processor and programmable logic equivalent to an Artix-7 FPGA. With the Arduino Uno, Raspberry Pi, and PMOD compatible connectors it was very easy to interface to a wealth of existing peripherals. Using the Jupyter Notebook environment provided rapid access to examples and documentation. Xilinx has done a great job with their GitHub repositories of example notebooks - which I used extensively in my roadtest. The abstraction provided by the Python wrapper libraries made it easy for a novice like me to start playing with programmable logic. I think that this is a good entry into using FPGAs and facilitates the move to more bare metal programming.
What I really appreciated about the PYNQ-Z2 Dev Kit is that I got to play around with binarized neural network structures. I hope this is the start of a productive learning experience.
