LED blinker

Introduction

For my experiments with the USB104 A7 board, I'd like to have the following development environment:

• recent version of the Vitis Core Development Kit
• recent version of the Debian distribution on the development machine
• basic project with all the USB104 A7 peripherals connected
• mostly command-line tools
• shallow directory structure

Here is how I set it all up.

Pre-requirements

My development machine has the following installed:

• Debian 12 (amd64)
• Vitis Core Development Kit 2025.1

Here are the commands to install all the other required packages:

apt-get update

apt-get --no-install-recommends install \
  bc binfmt-support bison build-essential ca-certificates curl \
  debootstrap device-tree-compiler dosfstools flex fontconfig git \
  libgtk-3-0 libncurses-dev libssl-dev libtinfo5 parted qemu-user-static \
  squashfs-tools sudo u-boot-tools x11-utils xvfb zerofree zip xc3sprog

Source code

The source code is available at

https://github.com/pavel-demin/usb104-a7-notes

This repository contains the following components:

• Makefile that builds everything (almost)
• cfg directory with constraints and board definition files
• cores directory with IP cores written in Verilog
• projects directory with Vivado projects written in Tcl
• scripts directory with Tcl scripts for Vivado

All steps of the development chain and the corresponding scripts are shown in the following diagram:

Getting started

Setting up the Vitis and Vivado environment:

source /opt/Xilinx/2025.1/Vitis/settings64.sh

Cloning the source code repository:

git clone https://github.com/pavel-demin/usb104-a7-notes
cd usb104-a7-notes

Building led_blinker.bit:

make NAME=led_blinker bit

Configuring the FPGA:

make NAME=led_blinker run

Reprogramming FPGA

It is possible to reprogram the FPGA using the xc3sprog program:

xc3sprog -v -c jtaghs1_fast tmp/led_blinker.bit