In this tutorial, Ivica Matic shows how to recreate a project which enables us to control the cooling fan on the Kria KV260 Development board using the Vivado tool from Xilinx. Ivica has been a part of the Sundance family since May 2020, when he started doing his placement year with us. During his time in Sundance he has worked on many interesting projects with customers ranging from Agriculture to the Mining industry.

Working with Sundance I have gained and improved my skills using: ROS, ROS2, MQTT, OpenCV, Darknet, Tensorflow, LaTeX, GitLab Actions, CI/CD, Unit Testing and much more. The purpose of this tutorial is to provide a guideline on how to use Amazon AWS EC2 Virtual Machine to create a hardware project using the Vivado tool and to provide a guide on how to upload the bitstream to our development board using Lynsyn Lite tool from Sundance utilizing the SSH tunnel between our local machine and EC2 VM Instance.

Ivica Matic

The Lynsyn Lite is a power measurement utility board, designed to measure the power usage of a system and correlate power values with the source code of the program running on the system. In addition to being a power profiler board, the Lynsyn Lite can also serve as a generic JTAG pod which is how we are going to use it in this tutorial.

The tutorial we are going to follow for our hardware part was created by our colleague, Jack Bonell, and is available here.

We receive AWS credits as part of our membership of Digital Catpult. We make use of these credits to help with the “heavy-lifting” operations. Mostly, we use EC2 instances to help us train and configure our object detection neural networks which we are later accelerating and implementing on the edge side.

In addition to using EC2 GPU instances, we are using other types of machines (i.e. t3) for task which require high cpu compute power, such as using Xilinx FPGA tools, compiling kernels, compiling root systems and more.