2x1=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.