Whitney Knitter Dives Into Tria AUBoard-15P Software Design
Knitter walks you through software design in AMD Vitis in the second part of her Tria AUBoard-15P series.
Mirroring her video series, our last article covered Hackster Pro Whitney Knitter’s introduction to the Tria AUBoard-15P FPGA (field-programmable gate array) board. That ended with exporting the XSA file from AMD Vivado Design Tools. If you’re following along, the next step is software design. In this video, Knitter walks you through the software design in AMD Vitis.
As Knitter explains, a smooth and frustration-free workflow is all about good organization paired with proper setup. That starts with creating a platform component — you need to do that before you can create an application component, because the application component references the platform component. You can create the platform component using the XSA file you exported when following Knitter’s first video in this Tria AUBoard-15P series.
For this demonstration, Knitter runs bare metal C rather than an operating system. But an OS is an option at that stage, if you want to go that route. You will also want to add whatever board support packages your application will require.
In the video, Knitter selects the example LWIP Echo Server application. That is great for initial testing and debugging to make sure everything works properly, and it can also be a good starting point for a custom application. As the name implies, it listens on the assigned IP and echoes back what it sees. That is obviously handy for verifying basic functionality, but it also gives you the building blocks to expand.
With that as the example, Knitter explains how to build the application based on the platform component you already set up. Because the workflow was done right, this step is simple and quick.
After that the Tria AUBoard-15P is ready to use. Assuming Ethernet is connected to a router on the computer’s same local network, you’ll be able to communicate with the LWIP Echo Servo. You can also do debugging over the JTAG FTDI connection through a micro USB cable.
In the next video, Knitter will show you have to create a full embedded Linux image for the Tria AUBoard-15P using PetaLinux.