davegravy

Hi, I'm brand new to FPGA development. I noticed that I can see a realtime view of various voltages via Vivado -> Hardware Manager -> XADC System Monitor -> Dashboard. Is there an easy way to also get a measure of currents associated with each voltage, such that power can be calculated (P=I*V)? I saw a quicktake video of a Xilinx employee showing a plot of realtime power of each subsystem, while downclocking and putting various components into standby... not sure if there was some special instrumentation involved. If it matters, I'm using a Digilent Cora-Z7 dev board.

Hi everyone, I just picked up a Digilent Cora Z7-07S to start on my first project, hopefully it was a sensible choice. So far I'm having a positive experience with it. I will need to pass data from FPGA to the cloud via the cell network, and I'm a bit clueless right now in terms of where to start with the additional hardware and software I'll need. I've seen there are some inexpensive Arduino shields which support CAT-M1 and NB-IoT, are these generally a good choice? I read somewhere the shield interface is SPI which you can't expect to push more than 10Mb/s over, but for my application I think this is more than enough (and I think NB-IoT is a limiting factor anyways). If it matters I'm in Canada, though most modules I've seen seem to claim global and/or North America support. I'm a bit unclear on if carriers need to "approve" specific modules and how much of a showstopper that might be. My project is for a battery+solar powered device, so low power is important. I'm hoping there is an easy way to have only the PL powered most of the time, then wake the processor and modem hardware every ~15 minutes to (possibly do some light DSP and then) upload a small payload, preferably to AWS IoT (I'm open to alternatives) and pull any user-directed configuration changes. I'm targeting an average power draw of under 1.2Watts for the whole device - hopefully that's not insane. I understand Petalinux and FreeRTOS are common OS choices, though not sure if either is well suited to this application. I know there's the A9 processor or a soft core like Microblaze can be used, but no idea of benefits/tradeoffs for this project. Any pointers regarding software libraries I can leverage to ease development are welcome. Are there any decently documented example projects targeting Digilent/Zynq 7000 boards similar to my use case I can use as reference? Any general advice is appreciated so I can focus my learning. Thanks, David