Choices of Design and Build one FPGA Project on Digilent Arty-S7

What I had envisioned here was a learning path that takes someone with microcontroller experience on say an Arduino Uno and give then an alternative route into FPGA by building on what they already know, whilst at the same time demonstrating some of the advantages of FPGA right from an early stage.

Using the MicroBlaze soft processor on the likes of the Arty S7 being discussed here could perhaps achieve that, assuming it was done well by encouraging the leaner to build upon their existing knowledge before diving into hardcore HDL design.

Using the likes of the Arty S7, then I envisioned the first steps being to be to turn it into an Arduino Uno like board using the basic MicroBlaze microcontroller preset and the block design mode to wire up some Arduino shield header pins. Then write some code to drop onto the MicroBlaze instance to do the blinky thing and output 'Hello world' to the console.

This should help keep them close to the comfort zone whilst getting to grips with a new IDE and leave them with a foundation that they can continue to do familiar stuff with and explore further.

However it hasn't really demonstrated any significant advantages over their existing platform. For that you need to be able to do something a bit new like changing the memory size, selecting and deselecting the peripherals to change the footprint or by adding additional peripherals like timers, UARTs, PWMs from the IP catalogue. Add a second MicroBlaze instance and target different programs to each. Play around with the different MicroBlaze presets. Something a bit different from what can be done on the likes of the Arduino Uno platform, demonstrating some of the flexibility and why they may want to continue exploring FPGA.

Once comfortable, then time to explore HDL and start adding custom logic blocks into the design.

All this would be running on the same dev board so at this stage no issues with interfacing between a microcontroller and separate FPGA or multiple instances of different vendors software. That aspect can be left for another day. Analogue inputs could be done through an Arduino shield or through PMOD modules.

I noticed the other day that Whitney Knitter ( knitronics  ) has created a fairly new 5-part video series but using the Arty Z7:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=or3yYwGyGpA&list=PLSTiCUiN_BoIM4anuvWS_bM7PTbECZ3PE

Rather than MicroBlaze soft processor, she walks through getting up and running on the embedded Arm processor then moving to embedded C and then finally onto some HDL. Well worth a watch for those wanting to get started on an Arty Z7 or similar.

My two pence.

This might be a bridge too far.  MicroBlaze doesn't support the Arduino execution environment out of the box.  So right away there is a big bump in setting up a default processor environment and connecting I/O to the Arduino compatible hat interface. There is no library support.   When they say bare metal they mean bare metal.   Most Arduino savvy makers don't really understand that the Arduino platform is a runtime environment and a suite of specialized libraries that run in that environment.  I think it would be better to approach the Arty as a new platform with a more simplistic development environment.  There are rudimentary libraries for the I/O devices in the IP catalog, but the learner is going to need instruction in the basics of a bare metal C/C++ environment to get any useful learning done.

First steps are getting a Microblaze system to say Hello World over a serial link.  This is what the Digilent tutorials offer.  But if the student doesn't have a grasp of what the object layout editor is doing they are not going to understand the problems that can occur as they try to customize the basic MicroBlaze design to meet their own goals.

I too think that starting with MicroBlaze is a distraction from what you're trying to learn: FPGA development.

A great module to work with, but if you start with that, you spend brain cells on a (for beginners or for those that want to learn cross-platform) side track in the training, that doesn't bring the goal closer. You need to make the elbows and hands dirty to begin with FPGA. By designing FPGA designs , doing FPGA exercises. Not loading a predefined block and hopping over to GCC.

I agree with Jan. Looking at it from the perspective of a JAVA programmer, which is what I do in my professional life. If someone asks me how to learn to program, I recommend that they start by learning to implement the basic sorting, search, graph, and string algorithms on their own, and then delve into the main design patterns. Let him do it by implementing them from scratch without the help of libraries. Later, when they have mastered the basics, I tell them the opposite, do not do anything from scratch, use the libraries and the well-known patterns that have thousands of hours of very intelligent people smarter than me behind them.

I am new to FPGAs but have a strong formal background in old digital electronics. Currently my interest in FPGAs is not digital design but curiosity about the complete embedded system design cycle. And for this reason I have designed a learning plan from a perspective away from logic gates or trying to master a certain HDL language. My interest is to know in a generic way a wide range of aspects about the design and flow of the current development of embedded systems using FPGAs.

Who knows, maybe I'll get hooked on the world of FPGAs and soon I'll go back on my words.

Learning a HDL language followed a strange curve in my case.
I have studied Boolean logic / digital circuit at school. But no hardware definition, or anything related to CPLD, FPGA.

I bought a Spartan-6 kit to learn HDL.

Understanding the language, and understanding designs, went  steady up. After a year I was able to understand someone's design. Often also why they did it a certain way.

Being able to design something myself was a sudden click. It took 7 years. My first VHDL design where I came up with an approach myself (not lifting someone's work and adapt it with trial and error), spontaneous, was last year. When I tried to make a quad pulse generator for shabaz's SDR.
It went fast from then on. From not being able to design a real thing, to coming up with several options, in a few days.
For me it was like learning to ride a bicycle. Lots of learning without result, without satisfaction. Then suddenly you manage to do it and there's no looking back. 

With programming languages, the ability to design things came very early, after I mastered just a few commands. That's closer to how my brain's thinking process works.