Getting Started with Z-turn Board V2: Initial Setup Guide (Part 1)

There aren't many great resources on the Z-turn Board (especially V2) for complete beginners to SoCs with integrated FPGAs, so this is the first part of what I hope to be many on the "bring up" of the board and interesting projects. I hope to get to use the expanded I/O cape as well which will allow me to utilize more of the User I/O pins on the Zinq.

Board Overview

The ZTurn board v2 is a System-on-Chip (SoC) dev platform that combines two main systems:

Processing System (PS):

• Dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor running up to 866MHz
• 1GB DDR3 RAM
• Standard peripherals (USB, Ethernet, SD card)

Programmable Logic (PL):

• Xilinx 7-series FPGA fabric (7020)
• 85K logic cells
• 53,200 LUTs and 106,400 flip-flops
• 220 DSP slices for signal processing

There are also many peripherals as seen in the picture above. The PS and PL have multiple connections to work in harmony and process data. For the sake of brevity, lets move into the setup. We will do a deep dive in some other article!

Initial Bring Up

Let's get this thing powered on!🚀

I will be following the instructions on the quick start guide and documenting any struggles I have along the way.

Plugging it up

First off, I am running Windows 11 Pro on a pretty beefy laptop (XPS 15 9530). As with all modern laptops, I only have USB-C to connect to the outside world, so we will have to contend with that.

According to the manufacturer, the SD card that ships with the board has a standard factory PetaLinux image burned on, making start-up easier. If you don't have this SD card or its corrupted, you should be able to image it with PetaLinux and pick back up from here.

With my SD card in, I made sure I had the jumper configuration set to boot from the SD card, like depicted below.

After that, plugging up 5v power adapter and the mini USB serial cable seemed simple enough! I brought out a basic USB-A to USB-C converter so I could get to my laptop's USB-C port.

⚠️Warning: Make sure to pay attention to whatever USB-A to USB-C converter you use and its quality. In my experience adapters can be very annoying failure points when trying to accomplish something simple.

As soon as you plug in 5v power you should see the blue LED label come on. Then when you plug your USB mini into the USB_UART port, you'll see a blinking LED and a continuous RED LED light up.

The USB cable that comes with ZTurn boards is typically a USB to UART (Universal Asynchronous Receiver-Transmitter) bridge cable. In case you didn't know, UART is a serial protocol. We will discuss that more in a bit.

The instructions say to plug up HDMI if you need it, but the HDMI connection on the ZTurn board won't display anything by default because the default PetaLinux image typically doesn't have display drivers enabled.

Windows Identification

Alright! Let's see if Windows identifies it.
Go to Device Manager and look specifically under:

1. "Other devices" (for unrecognized hardware)
2. "Ports (COM & LPT)"
3. "Universal Serial Bus controllers"

You can try checking these places and doing the classic "plug 'n unplug" to identify it, but note that if you have a USB-A to USB-C converter, you will also see that re-appear and disappear, so just be cognizant.

For tutorial purposes... the device will likely show up with a name akin to:

• CH340/CH341 or
• CP210x

I found mine under "Other devices" and sure enough its named "CP2103 USB to UART bridge controller."

Any device with a yellow triangle/exclamation mark is good news - it means Windows detects the hardware but needs drivers.

After some Googling, I found that the CP2103 is a specific model of USB-to-UART bridge chip made by Silicon Labs. Though, the more logical thing to do would have been look at the board! On the under side of the board, there's our CP2103 by Silicon Labs.

ℹ️Some extra info: The CP2103 chip converts between USB protocol and UART protocol. The board's processor has a UART peripheral that receives this communication which gives us the serial console access we will be using.

Installing the Drivers

We're getting closer!
Go to the SILABS - USB to UART Bridge Drivers and click on the downloads section.

I picked the Universal Windows Driver, they have a VCP (Virtual COM Port) driver that I believe is for older versions of Windows.

CP210x Universal Windows Driver
v11.4.0
12/18/2024

After downloading and unzipping, I right clicked my CP2103 device in Device manager, update driver, browse computer for drivers, and selected the unzipped directory. Post-install, it now shows up as a COM port with no errors.

It shows as COM3, so I looked at the manufacturer overview for BAUD rate and opened PUTTY.

Here's the connection instructions:

And PUTTY

I was then presented with a blank shell. Pressing enter got me to the login.

Typing in the default password of root and root and I'm in!

We have confirmed that the board is running PetaLinux 2018.3! At this point, we haven't even explored the tip of the iceberg. I am looking for the next article to be all about PetaLinux and potentially Vivado, so stay tuned!