Last year when Avnet released the Technical Training Courses for Ultra96, the courses were based on Xilinx 2018.3 tools, which did not include Xilinx Vitis. This 2018.3 Ultra96 TTC Series includes 8 total days of training across 6 different introductory and advanced courses, which is great! The courses do cost a small amount of money, but for the quality/quantity of training, it is a really incredible deal and still well worth the money and effort. Unfortunately, based on the timing of the development and release, the courses do not cover Vitis, which was introduced with Xilinx 2019.1 tools.
A company called GL Research has recently released a training featuring Xilinx Vitis and the Avnet Ultra96-V2 on the Open Hardware Repository. You can find this free training at https://ohwr.org/project/soc-course/wikis/home. Here is an excerpt from the course specification to give you an indication of what is provided:
This course applies the learn by example approach, introducing in each section the required theoretical concepts and then achieving a deeper understanding on the presented topics by performing practical exercises using the most important design tools and techniques.
Upon completion of the course, several software and hardware reference designs are created by following step-by-step detailed procedures including screenshots, commands and code snippets.
Many thanks to Javier garcialasheras for this wonderful contribution to the Ultra96 community!
One very interesting discovery that the GL Research team found during their course development is that different versions of Ubuntu processed Avnet's Ultra96-V2 Board Definition File (BDF) differently! This was news to us at Avnet, and we greatly appreciated the feedback provided! GL Research also pointed out several extraneous pieces of information that were benign but also confusing. You can read more about their BDF analysis at https://ohwr.org/project/soc-course/wikis/Custom-Board-Definition-Files#fixing-the-ultra96-v2-board-files
Based on this feedback from GL Research, Avnet has updated our GitHub for the Ultra96-V2 Board Definition File based on their recommendations. Please see the new definition here:
https://github.com/Avnet/bdf/tree/master/ultra96v2/1.1
Great job GL Research and Javier and thank you for sharing!
If you don't have the equipment, you can get it for under $400 (+tax) and start doing your own Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC designs!
Buy one of these:
Buy Ultra96-V2Buy Ultra96-V2
Buy Ultra96-V2 I-gradeBuy Ultra96-V2 I-grade
And both of these:
Buy Ultra96-V2 4A Power SupplyBuy Ultra96-V2 4A Power Supply
Buy Ultra96-V2 JTAG/UART AdapterBuy Ultra96-V2 JTAG/UART Adapter
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