Ultra96

In this post we’re going to setup a virtual machine with the tools for building PYNQ and we are going to build PYNQ release v2.6 (tool version 2020.1) for the Ultra96 board. We’re going to start with the virtual machine that we setup in the previous post How to Install PetaLinux 2020.1. That VM has Vitis 2020.1 and PetaLinux 2020.1 installed, both of which we will need to build PYNQ. If you want to avoid issues along the way, I highly recommend that you follow that post and recreate the same VM with exactly the same tool versions and OS.

One of our 96B Quad Ethernet Mezzanine customers has built an extremely tough looking heatsink to passively cool the Ultra96 single board computer and it’s Ethernet mezzanine. I just wanted to share the photos; it makes the Ultra96 look like a tank!

In this post we’re going to build an SD image for PYNQ release v2.5 (tool version 2019.1) for the Ultra96 board. The starting point will be the virtual machine that we setup in an earlier post How to Install PetaLinux 2019.1. In that post we installed Vivado & SDK 2019.1 and PetaLinux 2019.1 on the VM, and we’ll need all three of them to build the PYNQ SD image. I highly recommend that you follow that post and recreate exact same VM to avoid any issues going through this post.

In this video I use Iperf to measure the actual maximum throughput of a Gigabit Ethernet port on the Ultra96 v2 running PetaLinux. The result that I get is pretty impressive: 910-940Mbps!

To do this test yourself you’ll need to build the example design that you’ll find on our Github repo, and then prepare the SD card. Plug your SD card into your Ultra96 and fit the 96B Quad Ethernet Mezzanine on top of the Ultra96. You need to connect the Ultra96’s USB UART to your PC and open up a terminal (115200, 8-bit data, 1-bit stop, no parity).

Here’s a short introduction to our 96B Quad Ethernet Mezzanine. For more information, see the documentation at docs.ethernet96.com and if you want to buy the product, go to the order page here.

Update 2019-06-10: This product is now available to purchase! Read the documentation here, and get it from the order page here.

Over the last few months I’ve been really busy working on a new product and I just want to take a step back today and share some of it. Let me start with what it is and then I’ll tell you about how and why I did it.

The product

A 4-port Gigabit Ethernet mezzanine card designed for Avnet’s Ultra96 Zynq Ultrascale+ single board computer.