Arty General I/O Demo

Introductory level demonstration project for the Arty's LEDs, switches, buttons, and USB-UART bridge.

• Arty FPGA board
• Micro-USB cable

• Vivado Design Suite 2016.4
  • Newer versions can be used, but the procedure may vary slightly
• Digilent Board Support Files for Vivado
  • Follow the Vivado Board Files for Digilent 7-Series FPGA Boards guide on how to install Board Support Files for Vivado.

Arty GPIO Project Support Repository – ZIP Archive GIT Repo

1.) Follow the Using Digilent Github Demo Projects Tutorial. This is an HDL design project, and as such does not support Vivado SDK, select the tutorial options appropriate for a Vivado-only design. When prompted to return…

2.) To see the UART communication channel, open a terminal program on your computer set to 9600 baud, 8 data bits, no parity bit and 1 stop bit. Choose the COM port that your ARTY is connected to (To determine what COM port your Arty is connected to, open up Device Manager on your machine. Under Ports (COM & LPT) you should see something like 'USB Serial Port (COMX)' where the X is the number of the connected COM port). Then return to the Github Project Tutorial to finish programming and running the demo.

To run all the features of this demo, you will only need the Arty board.

For this section, all the switches are tied to their corresponding led. Every time a switch is toggled, the led directly above it will toggle with it.



The four tri-color LEDs will cycle colors with no interruption from other I/O.

On startup, ARTY will transmit “ARTY GPIO/UART DEMO!”. Whenever a button is pressed, ARTY transmits “Button press detected!”.