The Zynq chip is a product made by Xilinx (now owned by AMD). It contains a dual core ARM along with a good sized FPGA. It is quite capable of running linux, but I don't intend to do that. I have my own Kyu real time operating system, which is much better suited to this kind of project -- and more fun for me to work with.
My first pass will be to do something trivial with the FPGA and get it out of the way at first. What I will do is to set up a design that is just straight through mapping from the ARM GPIO (what they call "EMIO" is a GPIO interface to send signals into the FPGA). I need to set up the mapping because all the IO pins are only accessible from the FPGA. So what I do effectivly is to set up wires from EMIO "pins" to the pins that connect to the outside world.
Once this is done, I can just write code in C that runs on one of the ARM cores and controls the panel. I think that is a good way to get started. I have already set up the straight through mapping and used it to test all my connections. The game next will be to send information to the panel using these.
Tom's Electronics pages / tom@mmto.org