HDMI OUT with the ARTY-Z7

[Antonio Fasano]

Hello, Gentlemen,

Is there any good (Working) project that can help me do the Arty-Z7 show text and graphics on an HDMI monitor ?

Thanks

Antonio

[JColvin]

Hi @Antonio Fasano,

Digilent does not have such a project available for our HDMI boards. Xilinx has an IP core, Video On-Screen Display, (depreciated as of 2019.1 though) that does do some of these things: https://www.xilinx.com/products/intellectual-property/ef-di-osd.html#documentation.

I haven't gone through it myself, but I did find on the Xilinx forums a large and recently updated (as of December 2019) video series on getting video (HDMI, etc) working with Xilinx tools: https://forums.xilinx.com/t5/Video/Xilinx-Video-Series/td-p/849583.

Thanks,
JColvin

[D@n]

@Antonio Fasano,

I do have an HDMI project, but ... it's doesn't use any Xilinx IP's beyond the memory.  It doesn't use any CPU's, so I haven't offered to you before.  If that's something you are interested in, then we can chat further.

Dan

[Antonio Fasano]

Hi, Dan,

Absolutely !! I would very much appreciate if you could hep me with that !!!

Antonio

[D@n]

@Antonio Fasano,

Not a problem.  You can find it on github here.  It's part of a scrolling raster demonstration for a Nexys Video board (comes with HDMI out) and a PMod MIC3 attached as a microphone.  There's actually two projects in that repo--one that uses a DDR SDRAM and HDMI, and a second that contains (an unreasonable amount of) block RAM and outputs VGA.  The design works by sampling data coming from the microphone at 1Msps, downsampling (very significantly), windowing, applying an FFT, squaring the results, calculating an (approximate) logarithm, and then writing the results to RAM.  A second part of the design (present in both projects, of course), reads from the RAM and produces a VGA (or HDMI) output.  One of the key tricks to the design is that there are two images maintained in memory.  That's how the "scrolling" is handled--the pointer to the memory image is just moved over time to make it appear as if the screen scrolls from right to left.  Also, if you do Verilator and GTKMM, the C++ simulation/test bench will draw the scrolling raster of a swept tone onto a window on your machine.

It was a fun project to build and test.  Even better, other than the SDRAM (which you could break at the internal AXI interface ...), it's all RTL so it shouldn't depend upon any Vivado versioning hell.

Just a thought,

Dan

[Antonio Fasano]

Dear Jon and Dan,

Sorry for the late response.

Thank you both so very much for your help. I will review both your answers carefully and will try to make it work.

I will surely bother you again if I can't get it to work !!!  Sorry !!!

Best regards,

Antonio