Xilinx Zynq-7000 board eases industrial IoT dev’t

Article By : Avnet

The MiniZed Zynq board features on-board cloud connectivity, allowing designers to transform their laptops or mobile devices into on-the-go GUIs.

Avnet Inc. has introduced the compact MiniZed Zynq SoC development platform that supports cloud connectivity and industrial IoT applications, such as motor control and embedded vision.

The MiniZed is an entry-level development and demonstration platform for single-core Xilinx Zynq-7000 All Programmable SoC devices. "MiniZed also features Xilinx’s SDSoC Development Environment, which enables software engineers to quickly migrate compute-intensive C/C++ functions to hardware, accelerating the functions and offloading the processor,” noted Evan Leal, Director of Product Marketing at Xilinx.

The MiniZed features on-board connectivity through USB, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. Peripherals can be plugged into dual Pmod-compatible connectors, the Arduino-compatible shield interface, or the USB 2.0 host interface. User LEDs, a button and a switch allow for a physical board interface, while JTAG circuitry is incorporated onto the MiniZed base board. The on-board 8GB eMMC provides storage for the OS, files and logs.

“Designers need only connect to their laptops with a single micro-USB cable and they are up and running. And with Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, users can also connect wirelessly, transforming a mobile phone or tablet into an on-the-go GUI," said Stefan Rousseau, Senior Technical Marketing Engineer for Avnet.

Tutorials, such as demonstrations on how to implement filters and FFTs in the fabric, are available for download at <a href="http://minized.org/" style="text-decoration:none;" target="_blank" title=“MiniZed website”>http://minized.org.

The $89 starter kit shipments are starting in early July.