Nexys Video board: Xilinx tool and OS questions

[Vikram Boyaparti]

Hello all,

I am a new user and thrilled to join this community. I recently bought a Nexys video board and after reviewing both Xilinx and Digilent web sites, have these two questions:

• Windows 10 Home OK?
• Xilinx Vivado ML Standard (free) OK? This is where I go.

Background:

• My Xilinx account is no longer working. I emailed Xilinx to reestablish so I can download the tools.
• I still have an Arty Evaluation board with Vivado 2017 certificate based license on another machine. That machine is so slow and I have decided not to touch it for now.
  
  Thanks a lot. I look forward to a great experience on this forum.
  
  Vikram Boyapati

[artvvb]

Hi Vikram, welcome to the forum.

Xilinx officially supports the following versions of Windows in 2022.1:

• Microsoft Windows Professional/Enterprise 10.0 1903 Update; 10.0 1909 Update; 10.0 2004 Update: 10.0 20H2 Update; 10.0 21H1 Update

Home edition may still work, this just means they haven't tested with it.

As for Vivado, ML Standard Edition will work with the Nexys Video, however, you should be aware that the example projects Digilent provides may or may not be supported. The most up-to-date (but still marked under construction as they haven't been fully tested) materials, supporting Vivado 2020.1, can be found here: https://digilent.com/reference/programmable-logic/nexys-video/demos/start

Hope this helps,

Arthur

[zygot]

52 minutes ago, artvvb said:

The most up-to-date (but still marked under construction as they haven't been fully tested) materials, supporting Vivado 2020.1,

How exactly, are readers expected to interpret this sentence ? Most people would probably assume that they can just download the archived project files and generate a bitstream file that works as advertised with minimal effort. They would assume that any Xilinx IP used would be free to use without an evaluation license.

I've used the latest ML edition of the tools on both Win10 Pro and Ubuntu 20.04 but since installing it have found that it takes a very long time to bring up any of the Vivado editions that are installed, sometimes resulting in a timeout error ( though it does eventually start anyway ).

I believe that the edition of the tools that users probably want to use depends on a lot of factors, like device support ( ML supports the most ) and what they want to do, and what design flow they prefer. Xilinx IP might be free in one version and not in another. Vitis 2021.2 is a 60+ GB install and Vivado 2017.3 plus the SDK is about 10% of that. Either can support anything that the Nexys Video board is capable of. As you point out it is usually possible to install the Xilinx tools on host OS versions not specifically supported by Xilinx; though sometimes this involves some unexpected work-arounds.

Out of curiosity I downloaded the Nexys-Video-HDMI02020.1-1.zip source only to discover that it was totally empty of any code sources.

 

Edited May 16, 2022 by zygot

[artvvb]

That was pretty vague on my part, apologies. I should have said that XPR and workspace files which can be opened in Vivado and Vitis 2020.1 exist, however, I haven't personally had the opportunity to check whether their documentation is accurate to the steps needed to get them running. The documentation may be incomplete and the projects may be buggy. I'm looking into it.

It looks like you downloaded the "Source Files" zip on Github which does not contain sources as you noted. The correct downloads should be the -hw.xpr.zip and -sw.ide.zip files, as pointed out in the release description. I'll be updating these reference pages to make sure that they point directly to the file downloads, as opposed to the GitHub page, as the use of the releases page has definitely been confusing.

[Vikram Boyaparti]

Thank you. I will update you on my progress (once I have my account reestablished to download Xilinx tools).

[Vikram Boyaparti]

All,

Just wanted to provide an update with the Nexys Video board:

-Windows 11 Home works with Vivado ML Standard v2022.1

-Created a new project to blink a couple of LEDs - it works

- OLED Demo project from: 

Created project per instructions at tcl prompt and proceeded to synthesize and implement. However I get this error:

I verified charLib does indeed exist in the project folder, so I am lost:

 

Thanks,

Vikram

[artvvb]

hi Vikram,

The IP in this download were packaged with Vivado 2016.4, and are locked until you upgrade them - Vivado ships with only the most recent version of any particular IP core used. Upgrade the IP by navigating through Reports -> Report IP Status -> Upgrade Selected, as below. Since the affected IP only increment the minor version, no port name changes (that would require modifications to verilog sources) should be present. I've verified that (despite the language server freezing and requiring me to kill and restart the 2022.1 instance) a bitstream can be generated after doing this.

Thanks,

Arthur

[Vikram Boyaparti]

Thanks a lot, Arthur. I am now able to generate the bitstream and the demo is somewhat working (can see some text on the OLED display).

[Yes, the language server was freezing when I tried to bringup my Arty 35 evaluation board on this pc and I gave up on that board for now after three tries]

I'm getting excited about FPGAs.

Vikram

[miezekatzen_dompteur]

Thanks for the info...now i can build the project