Enabling TySOM Zynq-based Embedded Development Board for AWS IoT Greengrass

Everyday there are new devices appearing in homes, offices, hospitals, factories and thousands of other places that are part of the Internet-of-Things (IoT). Clearly, they need to be connected to the internet and there is a need for a huge amount of raw data to be collected , stored and processed on the cloud.

There are many data centers available to store the data. However, only some provide features specifically for IoT applications. One of the most complete cloud-based IoT services available is Amazon Web Services (AWS) IoT Greengrass. It enables edge devices to act locally on the data networked devices generate, and provides secure bi-directional communication between the IoT devices and the AWS cloud for management, analytics and storage.

By using AWS Greengrass IoT, devices can keep the data in synch even when not connected to the internet. Also, they can run AWS Lambda functions and make predictions based on machine learning models provided by AWS.

FPGA-based System-on-Chip devices are getting more popularity among IoT devices as an edge processing unit. Their high performance and low power, along with their reconfigurability, creates an ideal set up for IoT devices.

Among all SoCs, Xilinx Zynq devices have become very popular thanks to the flexibility of providing harden multicore ARM processors along with FPGA space, all integrated into a single chip. As an old and trusted partner of Xilinx, Aldec, has produced a range of embedded development boards (our TySOM Product Line) featuring Zynq 7000 and MPSoC devices along with a wide range of on-board peripherals. Recently, TySOM embedded development boards were qualified by AWS to run AWS IoT Greengrass core. Figure 1, shows the setup with TySOM board and AWS IoT Greengrass.

In this blog, I shall run through the process of enabling TySOM boards for AWS IoT Greengrass.

The main concepts to be covered are:

• Building a new Linux kernel image for a TySOM board that meets the requirements for AWS IoT Greengrass.
• Preparing a bootable SD card with a proper kernel image, bootloader, devicetree and Linux filesystem.
• Running IoT Greengrass qualification tests which include MQTT communication, dependency checking and many more.

For the purpose of this blog we chose our TySOM-3-ZU7EV board. By the way, Aldec provides a complete reference design which includes ready-to-use HW and SW to enable all the peripherals on the board. There is also BSP files which include devicetree, kernel image, bootloader and the bitstream file.

AWS IoT Greengrass requires that the target device supports specific kernel features which requires the kernel be recompiled. Petalinux is a set of software tools which uses Yocto to allows for embedded linux development. To recompile the kernel, we can use either the HDF file generated by SDK or by using the BSP file provided for the board by Aldec.

For the rest of this article, visit the Aldec Design and Verification Blog

Tags: AWS, AWS IoT Greengrass, embedded, FPGA IoT, IoT Greengrass, Zynq development board, Zynq for IoT, Zynq SoC

Categories: Emulation/Acceleration, TySOM Boards, TySOM EDK

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2020 at 9:36 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.