Software

Because the Basys 3 uses the Artix 7 chip by AMD (formerly Xilinx), this was designed in Vivado.

Installation

I installed Vivado several times. Each one was painful. For a full installation, it requires just under 130GB!. However, by choosing not to install support for non-Artix 7 chips, we reduce the total size down to a "measly" 97Gb.

For my initial on-campus work, I installed it on a system (MORE INFO TBD) in our computer science lab running Ubuntu (VERSION TBD). I chose to use the web installer to take advantage of my ability to use a reduced installation, and then chose to install the files right away after downloading; this was a mistake.

At the school's rate-limited 15MB/sec, the I waited over 2 hours to download and install Vivado – only to have to have the installation hang at the "final processing" phase. As described by this small article, two TUI libraries are required to finish setup. Normally, one would install these from the provided setup scripts in the downloaded files prior to installing, but since I chose to charge ahead right away, there was no chance. So I had to start all over again.

At home, I have a PC running Windows 11, an AMD CPU and an AND GPU. As this is the intended world AMD wants everyone to be in, things went much smoother. Additionally, I installed Vivado Labs on my laptop running PopOS – a variant* of Ubuntu – to flash to FPGA later. This was a much smaller install, at about 8Gb.

Setup: xsetup.sh and installLibs.sh

As I would learn later, you can re-run the installation without re-downloading if you run installLibs.sh, followed by xsetup.sh in the folder with the data. Some notes on Linux:

• This requires setting it as executable, as they aren't by default.
• *installLibs.sh supports many Linux Distros and their package managers, but uses the reported name of the OS. Although functionally Ubuntu, PopOS reports itself as "pop", so I needed to add the following to the end of the file:

if [ $OSDIST == "pop" ](/werydude/FPGA-Demo/wiki/-$OSDIST-==-"pop"-); then
  doUbuntu
fi

• After installing Vivado Labs on my laptop, the GUI wouldn't run. This is a symlink error caused by the some of the scripts not working correctly:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install libtinfo-dev
sudo ln -s /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libtinfo.so.6 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libtinfo.so.5

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