- After trying out Xyloni, wanted some thing with more LUTs and HDMI
output and found the
Arty S7 had nice looking HDMI examples.
- Based on the
Xilinx Spartan-7 FPGA. One nice thing is that it has true TMDS
pins for HDMI in/out.
- Got the -50 version instead of -25 because want to do full
P1V and have
extra space.
- Seems this is the Rev.E version. looks like there used to be a
Rev.B. Changes appear to be in the power supply circuit and the flash
chip.
- The Vivado software was a bit strange. Took forever to download
and then didn't show up in Windows 11 as an app anywhere. Had to
figure out there a vivado.bat that starts it up. It opens a DOS window
and then the actual app shows up. Usually, this kind of behavior means
we have an app that is not primarity targeted for Windows. But, after
using it a bit, I think it's OK. I made a mistake and got the Vitis
version, that includes soft core stuff I don't need, but Vivado is in there
too, so it's OK.
- Started out with this Blinky example that
flashes the yellow LEDs.
- Next, started looking at HDMI examples for direct output from pins.
Found some at the
Domipheus Labs and at
ProjectF. Neither
of these worked out of the box, but was able to make them work. Think
I'll stick with the ProjectF one because it's in Verilog instead of VHDL.
Here are working example projects:
- 720p from
Domipheus Labs
- 720p from
ProjectF
- 1080p
from ProjectF
- These are all rigged for the pinout from
Mike Vine's
Blog:
(click to enlarge)
- For the HDMI wiring, used a
Parallax P2 HDMI adapter and some solid copper core jumper wires.
Some monitors need 5V, which is why there's a jumper wire on the HDMI
adapter. I could have connected the 5V pin to the 5V on Arty's
Arduino header, but didn't need to yet.
- Here's the adapter schematic from Parallax:
(click to enlarge)
- Here's the Pmod JA pinout from the
Arty S7 manual that I used to edit the constraints file:
(click to enlarge)
-
(click to enlarge)
- Next step is to get P1V working. Should be
easy as has already been done for Xilinx devices.
- Took some time to get P1V working without timing
errors, files for working project
without critical timing errors here (updated 03Jan21)
