This week was a familiarization week for me. I personally do not have experience with HLS or xilinx FPGAs, so I was trying to get familiar with the platform we are using. To do so I went through the tutorial documents at https://xilinx.github.io/Vitis-Tutorials/2021-2/build/html/docs/Getting_Started/Vitis/Getting_Started_Vitis.html in order to understand the general workflows and structures of applications. This allowed me to gain a better understanding of how we need to restructure the Scotty3D library in order to accelerate it on the hardware.
I also began looking at using the DisplayPort interface on the board, as we want to display our rendered outputs so utilizing the DisplayPort will be necessary. There were several helpful documents I found such as https://xilinx-wiki.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/A/pages/18842318/ZynqMP+Standalone+DisplayPort+Driver. This page links to several examples of how to use DisplayPort drivers for applications on the Xilinx board. I anticipate getting this to work correctly will be somewhat finicky, which is why I have started to look into how it works early on.
Although initially starting up any project will be somewhat slow due to figuring out workflows, I believe that we are making steady progress and I think that we are on schedule. Next week I would like to make progress on working on getting the data from the CPU on the board to the FPGA.