Arty A7 Artix-7 FPGA Development Board

In the final part of the Arty base project tutorial, we build a PetaLinux project that’s tailored to our Arty base design. Then we boot PetaLinux on our hardware and verify that we have network connectivity by checking the Arty’s DHCP assigned IP address and then pinging it from a PC.

Here’s a base project for the Arty board based on the Artix-7 FPGA. The Arty is a nice little dev board because it’s low cost ($99 USD) but it’s still got enough power and connectivity to make it very useful. I really like the fact that the JTAG and UART are both accessed through the same USB connector, so I only need to connect one USB cable. I also like the fact that I can power it from the USB connector alone - provided I don’t connect too many power hungry PMods or an Arduino shield.

I just got the news about the new ARTY $99 FPGA evaluation kit being released and I thought it was worth a mention. At the $99 price point and with the Arduino shield connector, they’ll attract a lot of hobbyists who can now hook up one of the many existing Arduino shields to a Series-7 FPGA. Another interesting thing is that it ships with a webserver reference design so  you’ve got a head-start on your IoT applications. Definitely a lot of possibilities with this board and I might just get one for myself.