Vivado HLx 2016.1 WebPack Now License Free!

Since the WebPack is now license free, I decided to give it a shot. Here are my current specs:

Installing just the Zynq 7000 with the SDK requires a 3.43 GB download which didn't hang once using the installer. I'm doing this all in user-space so I installed it into $HOME/local/src/xilinx and used stow to install binaries into $HOME/local/lib and $HOME/local/bin.

Since it has been years since I last did anything with the Zybo, I'll try to reproduce the steps I took last time.

XUP FPGA Design Flow Lab 1, 2 and 3

First thing I notice with Vivado 2016.1 is that it doesn't play well with 3200x1800 screen resolutions - all dialogs have their text completely hidden. Shame. Setting my display to 2560x1440 makes it usable again but still some options in the dialogs are hidden - I'd prefer not to have to go all the way down to 1920x1080. What is this, 2015!?

I managed to acquire Digilent's USBUART Pmod and used it for lab 3 in the XUP FGPA Design Flow class. I used minicom as root. I could have added my user to the "dialout" group and tried that, but "sudo" is easy and I felt relatively safe to do so at this point. I got the device file from dmesg:

goetz@localhost:~>dmesg  | grep USB | tail
[82582.685106] usb 1-3: new full-speed USB device number 23 using xhci_hcd
[82582.855713] usb 1-3: New USB device found, idVendor=0403, idProduct=6001
[82582.855727] usb 1-3: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[82582.855735] usb 1-3: Product: FT232R USB UART
[82582.859371] ftdi_sio 1-3:1.0: FTDI USB Serial Device converter detected
[82582.860234] usb 1-3: FTDI USB Serial Device converter now attached to ttyUSB0

So I opened /dev/ttyUSB0 with minicom and used default settings everywhere else and the LEDs on the Zybo lit up as I typed! Very cool!