Building A Custom Zynq-7000 SoC Development Board From The Ground Up

I have a new post on Hackaday: Building A Custom Zynq-7000 SoC Development Board From The Ground Up.

The presenter starts by designing the power system, then makes progress on power, improves the schematic, integrates DDR RAM, adds USB PHY, Ethernet PHY, and SD card, starts on HDMI, makes progress on layout, makes progress on routing, continues with routing, configures with Vivado and estimates costs, receives PCBs and components, starts the PCB assembly, adds power rail components, adds core components, connects power and does initial programming, makes an LED blink, gets the ARM APU working, troubleshoots FT2232H to JTAG, resolves FT2232H to JTAG issue, adds UART and DDR, gets HDMI working, installs PetaLinux, and at long last configures USB and Ethernet in PetaLinux.

See AMD Zynq 7000 SoCs for specs from AMD. The executive summary is that this SoC includes an ARM Cortex-A9 Based APU and an Artix-7 FPGA (or a Kintex-7 FPGA on higher models). We suppose this is an opportune time to mention that in case you missed it Xilinx was recently acquired by AMD which is why you see the AMD branding now.

Summarizing references from these videos, other videos include What your Differential Pairs Wish You Knew and How to Achieve Proper Grounding by [Rick Hartley]; books referenced include Printed Circuits Handbook 7ed and Signal and Power Integrity Simplified 3ed; courses referenced include Mixed-Signal Hardware Design with KiCad and Advanced Digital Hardware Design from [Philip Salmony]; and software used includes EasyEDA, Vivado, Vitis IDE, and Tera Term.

Mail Call #28: EEVblog BM036, Test Hook Clips, 4mm to 2mm Banana Adapter, a Book and a Movie

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ATtiny85 in HW-260 board

I have my ATtiny85 microcontroller installed in a HW-260 development board (purchased from AliExpress). I program the ATtiny85 with the SparkFun Tiny AVR Programmer, the setup guide is here: Tiny AVR Programmer Hookup Guide.

On the SparkFun programmer the onboard LED is PB0. On the HW-260 the onboard LED is PB1. This is the code I used to flash the HW-260 LED:

#define LED_BUILTIN PB1

// the setup function runs once when you press reset or power the board
void setup() {
  // initialize digital pin LED_BUILTIN as an output.
  pinMode(LED_BUILTIN, OUTPUT);
}

// the loop function runs over and over again forever
void loop() {
  digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, HIGH);   // turn the LED on (HIGH is the voltage level)
  delay(1000);                       // wait for a second
  digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, LOW);    // turn the LED off by making the voltage LOW
  delay(1000);                       // wait for a second
}

You can see the programmer settings I used in Arduino IDE in this screenshot:
Screenshot of Arduino settings

All You Need To Know About The Diode Test Mode On Your Multimeter To Fix Stuff

Today I watched All You Need To Know About The Diode Test Mode On Your Multimeter To Fix Stuff. Richard listed some typical forward voltages across various types of diodes:

  • Schottky Diode ~ 0.15V
  • Germanium Diode ~ 0.22V – 0.28V
  • Fast Switching Diode ~ 0.4V – 0.45V
  • Silicon Diode ~ 0.5V – 0.6V
  • Red LED ~ 1.7V – 1.8V
  • Yellow LED ~ 1.8V
  • Green LED ~ 2.2V – 2.3V