After the FPGA finally arrive this week, I was able to become more productive in the team effort. In the beginning, I found out that the power supply used for the Ultra-96 isn’t compatible with the Kria and had to wait a few more days for the power supply to arrive and begin testing. I then flashed the factory image and booted linux on the FPGA. The linux boot process was troublesome, the documentation wasn’t very clear and I had to do quite some debugging to control the FPGA from UART port initially, connect the FPGA to internet and update repos(there is a certificate invalid error that took some time) and then setting up the FPGA boot Ubuntu image and building the pynq server onto the fpga. In the end the FPGA is setup as a server that can be accessed anywhere on campus using CMU WIFI with the help of pynq, which also includes an easier way to setup PS to PL connection.
I plan to do more with the FPGA next week, getting the demos to read/write the fpga between PS/PL, and setting up ssh connections for computer 2 FPGA transmissions. I will also start to look into the specific RTL modules that needed to be designed to accelerate the BitNet text autocomplete modules.