Petalinux 2020.2 BSP for Ultra96v2 with Wifi & VNC Server

Work Brief

Avnet Ultra96v2 is one of base development platform board for AI acceleration works. If you want to accelerate custom application on it then for petalinux flow you will need to have BSP of the Ultra96v2 for your version of petalinux.

And for ml application you might also need wifi connectivity on the ultra96v2, that is one of needy thing. Till Petalinux 2020.1, Avnet also have released BSP from this link [here], while we dont have found the proper BSP [with wifi] for Ultra96v2 till this tutorial made.

So, we uses the Ultra96v2's 2020.1 based BSP given by Avnet and created 2020.2 based BSP with wifi patches.

By this 2020.2 BSP you can have wifi enabled on your petalinux build and you can use ssh on it and use for ML acceleration applications.

These are the steps we followed for creating this BSP

Creating Petalinux Project

- petalinux-create --type project --template zynqMP --name project0
- petalinux-config --get-hw-description ../system.xsa

Configuration setting

• in config enter 'avnet-ultra96-rev1' in machine name, change serial from uart0 to uart1
• in Yocto settings change machine -> 'ultra96v2'
• copied conf, recipes-connectivity, recipes-kernel, recipes-modules, recipes-utils from meta-avnet folder into meta-user;
• also copied device-tree/ultra96v2/system-bsp.dtsi into system-user.dtsi file

BSP File

Petalinux 2020.2 BSP file is linked here: ultra96v2_2020_2_with_VNC.bsp

How to build Steps to build your own custom project from ultra96v2_2020_02.bsp

• Create project by using:

petalinux-create -t project -s ultra96v2_2020_02.bsp --name <project_name>

• Now change the configuration of file system according to requirement using:

petalinux-config

• build the project using:

petalinux-build

General Output while testing on board

In this BSP based build, wifi connection will work through shell script 'wifi.sh' file available at home folder. You have to run it as shown in following figure!

VNC Server Setup

This build also have VNC, so if you start "vncserver" from the terminal of Ultra96-UART connection then you can get desktop of Ultra96. You can use application like Mobaxterm or VNC viewer itself to connect VNC server from your PC. The details of starting VNC server is also detailed with steps at Deephi-DNNDK-tutorial-for-Ultra96_LogicTronix_June_2019 at page number 12-13.

Finally, we got the VNC server connected and got the desktop of Ultra96 Petalinux Build as follows: