Getting Started with RP FPGA Programming

[john k2ox]

I bought my board with the idea that it has all the hardware to sample RF with the high speed ADCs and use FPGA DSP techniques to demod the signals.

I was hoping that a lot of people would have had the same idea, but I don't see that happening. If there are lingerers out there please speak up.

As far as development goes it appears that the Xilinx ISE and Vivado are the tools. I have used the ISE webpack with the Papilio Pro board. Looking forward, should I be using ISE(no longer being developed) or Vivado?

As for programming the Zync, it looks like there are two choices, write to a mem card on a PC then move it to the RP to load it and JTAG. I'm thinking that the mem card technique will be really slow and probably wear out the connector before I get anything working. Is it as bad as I'm thinking? Is JTAG the way to go or is there another way?

I see $30 Xilinx (Chinese?) JTAG programmers on eBay. Do they work? Any low cost known working solutions?

BTW. There is a new book. 'The Zync Book' at http://www.zynqbook.com/ it's free to download.

Lots of questions. I look forward to getting this project rolling.

TIA,
John

[Nils Roos]

Once you have a working SD-card, you do not need to remove it from the RP to update it.
If you can boot the RP into linux and attach it to a network, you can update the software on the SD-card remotely by (re-)mounting it writable and do whatever you need to do with it.

[john k2ox]

Thanks.