2×1=10

The ZYBO is an evaluation board for the Xilinx Zynq-7010 All-Programmable SoC made by Digilent. I got mine from Trenz Electronic at a reduced price for academic use.

I chose it over the ZedBoard (which I already have some experience with) because of the reduced size and since I don’t need the high-density I/O jack. It turns out though that the board is very small, yet quite heavy.

One thing to keep in mind though is that despite the rather large number of PMOD connectors, not all of them might be actually useful for a given task. The one on the left is connected to the Cortex processor, the right one is mixed analog/digital, and the three lower right ones are differential, leaving exactly the one on the lower left as a logic-dedicated PMOD for the FPGA (i.e. a single ended one that is connected directly to the FPGA, apart from the XADC one, of course).

I originally intended the board to be used to experiment with the OV7670 camera, but that might turn out to be a problem because of the PMODs. So: Caveat emptor.

I had some trouble getting Digilent Adept and/or iMPACT to recognize my board (despite having installed the necessary plugins), because I had downloaded the wrong version of Digilent Adept – sadly the search box on the Digilent website yielded Adept 2.3 as the best hit, which is outdated. After downloading the recent version from here, everything worked as expected and the device was correctly identified by iMPACT.

Unfortunately, while Digilent’s own software, Adept, was now able to talk to the board too, it was still unable to recognize the chip.

Edit: After asking Digilent support I received a mail saying that the Zybo can’t be programmed with Adept, so that’s expected behavior.

Edit: I wrote up a quick-start tutorial for the ZYBO. You can read more about it here.