[Part 1] Part xc7k160tfbg484-2, chapter 2 needed to complete linked tutorial

[mbforbes]

I think (and I could have been confused about this because it was the beginning of the assignment) that the installation instructions should have us install an additional part in order to follow the recommended tutorial (chapters 6 and 7 of the Xilinx guide).

When attempting to play along with chapters 6 or 7, the project won't run. The error messages that come up reference something about a "part" not being set, which is confusing when you're just starting out. When you google for the error message, it's a bunch of forum posts with people telling people to run commands in a "tcl console," which is also confusing (if you're in the GUI and don't know what "tcl" is).

What I ended up realizing is that when you open up the tutorial files, you need to specify which part (which also I think is called an "IP" = "intellectual property" ... and I just think of as "FPGA board") you're going to use as a target to build the code. (I guess it's analogous to picking your compiler target between x86 and ARM when compiling "normal" code.)

This is covered in the Xilinx guide in chapter 2 (specifically, page 15).

However, the part they end up picking ( xc7k160tfbg484-2) isn't one that we have installed (I think). So, instead, I picked a part that seemed to be very similar to the one they recommend. However, it's different enough that when you run through chapters 6 and 7, all of the numbers and diagrams are off from what they show in the guide. This makes following through and doing the analysis a bit tricky (especially if everything is totally foreign and you're still trying to get a bearing of what the heck is going on).

So, if installing that part for free is possible, it might be good for future iterations of the lab to have that part installed and point them to chapter 2 to get it setup.

(Apologies if I'm crazy here / feel free to shame me in the comments.)

[mbforbes]

One more tiny note about the tutorials: they take (or at least took me) waaaay longer than 30 mins. I would estimate 2hrs as a good ballpark median to provide on the assignment page. (Part of this could be someone used to writing high-level software repeatedly overcoming the shock that yes, you are analyzing and optimizing the clock ticks and hardware implementations of individual C++ instructions .)