Once upon a time I got a Virtex-7 based board from oven and had to test it. For some silly reason I did not wanted to make counter for LED toggle, so I wrote some code.. and then did take the Arduino "LED Blinky" code.

Compiled it, loaded the bit file into Virtex7, and yeah the LED did blink!

This was the first time I did Arduino Code on FPGA, and this first code was used to test the most expensive FPGA board I have designed.

The first version was targeting Microblaze MCS as I did think that Microblaze does cost money, but hey Microblaze FULL (not MCS) is free, and is free with free tools. Isnt that cool?

Of course the Cortex-A9 cores on ZYNQ can also be used using completely free tools.

to be continued...