[Ground-station] Remote Labs FPGA Accessibility update

Michelle Thompson mountain.michelle at gmail.com
Mon Dec 13 13:32:05 PST 2021


We're working on getting the ADRV9371 (Analog Devices RFIC) + zc706
(Ultrascale FPGA) Remote Labs equipment combination much more accessible
remotely.

The reference design and boot images from Analog Devices are intended for
SD card use. This works well, but when you access remotely, you are
generally using JTAG, and the filesystem for the ADRV9371 is too large to
be simply loaded up into memory.

The goal is to allow development without having a person physically moving
SD card media. This process is reminiscent of doing test runs like some of
us used to have to do with sets of punch cards. While we would do this if
we had to, mounting the filesystem from the network (NFS) removes a huge
amount of friction and delay.

We have gotten JTAG boot/NFS root filesystem mount working with petalinux
builds, but not yet gotten it working with the boot images and root
filesystem from Analog Devices.

Here's a PDF writeup of the current procedures and status on this. Getting
this working is a high priority, so if you know someone that would be
interested in this or has some advice on booting up stations like this
remotely using NFS root filesystem mounting, then please get me or Paul
Williamson KB5MU in touch. We will be working on this until it's done.
There's lots of innovation and improvement that can be made here.

This is a high priority because we have a lot of things that are very close
to being demonstrated - if we can get this part solved.

More soon!   :+)
-Michelle W5NYV
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