I'm developing a data acquisition program that will send data collected by an FPGA back to a PC over ethernet for visualization. When the Arty is powered and plugged into the PC via ethernet though, the network and sharing center (Win 11) doesn't detect the FPGA in any capacity.
I have a Nexys Video FPGA as well that is detected by my PC over ethernet, so I'm confused as to why one is detected but not the other. I've looked around to see if I'm missing some drivers for the Arty's PHY (DP83848), but haven't really found anything.
Any help would be appreciated. I'm new to trying to communicate over ethernet, so I could easily be missing something obvious.
The Arty A7 board will be detected on the USB port, where it will expose a Jtag cable implementation from Digilent.
But the Ethernet port functionality is not something self-contained. It depends on the design being stored in the configuration flash, and whether it hosts any TCP/IP protocol stack or not.
The PHY chip that converts MII interface to Ethernet cable handles only physical layer, it negotiates for speed and capabilities with the switch' port, but it does not make up any logical entity that will be responding to network requests. It will not answer to ARP or any other broadcasted IP requests, this is the responsibility of the logic behind the MII interface, so the answer depends entirely on what is there in the FPGA's currently flashed configuration bitstream.
So if Arty A7 is not discovered on the network - this is only a problem if you specifically running a design that is talking some TCP/IP.