A Zynq-based Arduino Shield on Hackaday. No Arduino required.

Arduinos are extremely popular, low-cost, 8-bit microcontroller boards with somewhat limited processing power but with a long list of compatible shields capable of all sorts of common, unusual, and just plain weird interfacing. Want to boost that processing power by three orders of magnitude or so? Make a Zynq-based shield based on the Arduino board footprint. That’s exactly what a new project on Hackaday creates: an open-source Arduino-compatible Zynq shield. The Zynq shield essentially replaces the Arduino’s 8-bit processor with a dual-core, 32-bit ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processor and the Arduino’s few kilobytes of SRAM with 64Mbytes of LPDDR2 SDRAM.







Here’s a 2-minute video of the Zynq-based shield in action:




(Note that there’s no Arduino connected.)



The video makes the point that the programmable hardware and programmable I/O on the Zynq SoC can be used to create all sorts of peripherals, as required by your application. This one board replaces all sorts of dev boards and provides more and better resources.