Schematics Exploration
Learning the board and the schematics
Recap
So last time, I found all the stuff I needed to communicate to the AD9363 from the fppga fabric!! I even found some examples of sample projects that are built on the similiar fabric that happens to also talk to the AD9363. The following is a very rough high level diagram of the relative flow that I decided I would use:
Figure 1: Output from terminal
Since I just really wanted something to transmit a custom waveform, I did not bother with an RX side and I also was sending data to this waveform every 2 seconds from software so I opted to used a slightly slower AXI full interface to pass in the data since it was easier. I did not feel the need to go and setup a DMA controller and use DMA for this core. But in the future I may want to, hence why I left the interface as an AXI full interface.
Slight Complication
So to start the project, I needed to figure out what constraint file I needed to give Vivado to set things up for setting up this board. The issue was, there were no public constraint files out there on the web for this. In fact, there really wasn’t actually any resources out there for this fpga. When I googled up the name of the board, I was only able to find links for buying the board, no links for any actual sample projects and resouces.
After googling for hours, I reached out to the vendor for any documentation. Turns out they did have documentation and even some sample projects, the only catch was that all the text was in Chinese and all the files were in this Chinese sketchy cloud service called Bauido or something. I was not about to install the client for that cloud service on my desktop because I do not trust anything I can’t read. So that was rough. I was however able to screenshot the schematics sheet in the webbrowers view so I had an okay understanding of how the system was put together.
It took a while but I was able to extract a decent amount of information from these files thanks to google translate and screenshots. This was frankly extremely frusterating since I could very well see that the sample project were there, I just could not access it without giving the CCP information and access to my computer.
Next Steps
With the schematics I had a good idea of what pins on the processor were connect to what and exactly what part was used in this board. Armed with this knowledge, it was time to make a very simple project to get a “hello world” of sorts working on this board.