Connecting the Zedboard

In the labs, the ZedBoards are connected through to the network. Please see the canvas page for IP addresses and access information.

This page is about connecting the ZedBoard manually (e.g. at home or additinal connection).

The main way of connecting to the ZedBoard is through the USB OTG described in the first section. Alternatively, you can connect through the ethernet port – see second section.

1 USB Connection

The ZedBoard has 3 different USB connectors on its upper left corner. Connect a USB cable to the connector labelled “USB OTG” (see left side of image below).

ZedBoard Connectors

After the ZedBoard has booted (blue LED on left of OLED display, and green LED on right of OLED display) and a few more seconds of waiting, a virtual network card will appear in your host machine. Typically there is no other configuration necessary at this point and you will be able to reach the ZedBoard at the IP address 10.42.1.1.

To give more details, the ZedBoard runs a DHCP server and will give your PC/Laptop automatically an address on the virtual network card.

Windows Notes: The virtual network card appears as “USB Ethernet/RNDIS Gadget” on Windows. Windows will report “No Internet access” for the virtual network card. This is expected as your PC/Laptop cannot reach the internet through the ZedBoard.

If Windows detects a USB Serial device (adding a new COM port) instead of “USB Ethernet/RNDIS Gadget”, follow these instructions to update to an RNDIS driver.

2 Ethernet (Network) Connection

It is also possible to use the ethernet port on the ZedBoard, with two different strategies:

You have a spare port on a machine and want to connect to the board directly (default): The board is already pre-configured for this scenario with a static IP address of 10.42.1.2. On the machine side, you will have to configure the network card with an static IP address in the range 10.42.1.x (e.g. 10.42.1.10, subnet mask 255.255.255.0, no default gateway),
instructions.
You have a spare port on a router and want to connect the board to your local network: In this case there are a few more steps that must be done to configure the board properly:
1. Connect to the board using the serial port (USB connector labelled UART) so it can be accessed for the first time.
2. Using a a serial terminal (e.g. putty or Tera Term on windows; screen on linux), connect to the ZedBoard. The baudrate should be set to 115200.
3. Once connected, hit Enter to see the login prompt. Log in as root
4. Locate the wired network configuration file at /etc/systemd/network/ethernet.network
5. Edit the file (using your editor of choice e.g. nano or vim) in order to enable DHCP for the wired network interface. vi /etc/systemd/network/ethernet.network Consult examples for examples on how to set it up. Example configuration file:
```
[Match]
Name=eth0
      
[Network]
DHCP=yes
#Address=10.42.1.2/24
#DNS=10.42.1.254,8.8.8.8
      
#[Route]
#Gateway=10.42.1.254  
#Metric=10
```
6. Connect the board to your local network. You should see a console message that the cable is plugged in. To activate the changes you made to the network configuration, restart the networking component.
```
sudo systemctl restart networking
```
7. Check what IP address the ZedBoard has aquired using ifconfig and see the output for eth0.
8. Now, access the ZedBoard directly through the IP address that is assigned to it by your router.

Note that with both approaches, the included lab Makefile special targets will no longer work since the ZedBoard’s IP address is manually defined in them. To overcome this, open up the Makefile provided with the skeleton code and change the value of the ZEDBOARD_IP variable to match your current setup. Also update the .launch file in the project with the new IP.