In my work I have to use a lot of different FPGA and SoC dev boards, and when I switch from one to another it’s always a pain because I can never remember the little details like “What are the DIP settings to set the boot mode to SD card?" and “Where is the DIP switch for that?". So my crutch for this has been to keep a little text file for each dev board containing the little useful details like:
- How to set the boot mode (DIP switch settings, jumpers, etc)
- What the device part number is
- Where to download the board definition files
- What the flash part number is
Every time I’d take out a dev board, I’d just check my little “quick reference” file for that board and I’d be up and running quickly. It’s definitely much easier than digging through the user guides.
I figure that if these quick references are useful to me, then maybe they would be useful to other FPGA developers. So I’ve added them to the blog. You’ll find them under the “Boards” section of the blog, just click on “Boards” in the main menu (above), or type this URL into your browser: www.fpgadeveloper/boards. From that page, you can click on the board you are interested in, and then click “View All”. That will show you the board’s quick reference, followed by a list of the blog posts that relate to that board.
If you’re the kind to type it into the browser instead, you could say type
fpgadeveloper.com/boards/zedboard and you would get the quick reference for the
ZedBoard which you can also see here.
I invite you to check it out. If you often work with development boards, I hope that it works out to be useful to you.