Eclypse Z7 Out of Box Demo

Description

The Out-of-Box demo is programmed into the Eclypse's flash memory at the time of manufacturing. As the demo does not make use of any Zmods, it may not be the most useful, however, it is presented here in case you want to review its sources or reprogram the flash.

Inventory

  • Eclypse Z7
  • Vivado and Xilinx SDK installations compatible with the latest release of this demo (2019.1)
  • Serial Terminal application to receive messages printed by the demo
  • Git is required to download the sources
  • A power supply for external power
  • A microUSB cable for a USB connection to the host computer

Download and Usage Instructions

The projects will be downloaded by cloning the Eclypse Z7 repo on Github. Use of git to obtain the sources is recommended. It is still possible to download ZIPs of the projects from Github but dependencies will need to be downloaded and placed in the correct locations manually.

The Out-of-Box demo doesn't use any Zmods, but it is perfectly safe to have them plugged in while running it. It should be noted that Zmods are not hot-swappable.

Get the power supply and USB cable plugged into the board. It can be powered on whenever.

Download the demo project with the below command: 

git clone --recursive https://github.com/Digilent/Eclypse-Z7.git -b OOB/master

The sw subdirectory of the folder created when you run this command (“Eclypse-Z7”), will be used as the Xilinx SDK workspace in later steps.

If you want to download the Vivado and PetaLinux projects at the same time, instead clone the Eclypse-Z7 repository (still using the oob/master branch). Instructions on working with these projects, as well as on how to check them out from source, can be found in the Eclypse Z7 Git Repositories documentation.

Launch Xilinx SDK and select the software folder as the workspace.

The projects in the repository now need to be added to the workspace.

Click the “Import Project” button.

Choose the directory previously chosen as the workspace as the root directory, make sure all of the project boxes (that aren't grayed out) are checked and click Finish.

Next, make sure the projects have been built and select “Xilinx Tools → Create Boot Image” from the menu at the top of the window. In the dialog that pops up, pick memorable locations to put the boot image format (BIF) file and the binary boot image (“boot.bin”). “Add” the FSBL ELF file (found in the FSBL's Debug folder), the bitstream (found in the hardware platform), and the application ELF file (found in the application's Debug folder) to the image in that order. Click “Create Image” to continue.

Next, make sure that the Eclypse is plugged in and the programming mode select jumper is set to JTAG. Select “Xilinx Tools → Program Flash”, select the BOOT.bin file you just created for the Image File field, and enter the FSBL ELF file into the “FSBL File” field. Everything else can remain as default. Click “Program” to continue. The process of programming the flash may take several minutes.

Finally, switch the programming mode select jumper to QSPI and power cycle the board to boot the demo.

When the project is run, the LEDs will begin cycling, and, whenever one of the buttons is pressed, the message “Button # pressed!” is printed to a connected serial console.

Once you've run the projects, check out the Eclypse Z7 Git Repositories documentation for more information on how the repository you cloned is structured and how to obtain and build the software project's dependencies.

Additional Resources

All materials related to the use of the Eclypse Z7 can be found on its Resource Center.

For technical support, please visit the FPGA section of the Digilent Forum.