The WiLink™ 8 Wi-Fi®, Bluetooth® and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Pmod™ Adaptor is a small adaptor card that enables the connection of the Texas Instrument WL1835MODCOM8 (2.4 GHz) and WL1837MODCOM8I (5.0 GHz) wireless evaluation boards to several of Avnet’s “Zed-series” development boards. When combined with one of the Texas Instruments WiLink 8 eval boards (not included), the adaptor adds wireless connectivity to the Xilinx Zynq®-7000 All Programmable SoC solutions. The WiLink 8 adaptor uses two Digilent compatible Pmod connectors to facilitate the connection of the WiLink 8 board to either ZedBoard, MicroZed, PicoZed, or the Mini Module Plus. Sustained high throughput WLAN connectivity is ensured by implementing the host interface between the Zynq processor and the wireless module with a 4-bit wide SDIO interface clocked at 50MHz. A UART-based Bluetooth/BLE interface is supported via a separate Pmod-compatible connector.

The included documentation and example designs demonstrate the software build process using Yocto and Xilinx’s Open Source Linux Distribution. Details on how to add Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and BLE are covered in detail, helping developers quickly add wireless capabilities for Internet of Things, multimedia, industrial and home automation, security, and M@M industrial applications.