Ben,
Thank you again for the details. Until I read your latest reply I assumed that I could run a standalone Nengo application on the PYNQ-Z1 FPGA, with comm support from the ARM. Under this assumption I was hoping to use the FPGA as a surrogate for a Loihi board or a similar piece of hardware that supports Nengo SNNs. From your description I realized that my assumption was wrong.
However, I like your suggestion to run both the Simulink-generated plant model and Nengo on a single Raspberry Pi board. I know that Mathworks modifies Raspbian (a distro of Debian) to make it work with Simulink but it’s worth trying.
Also, I have already started to prototype the plant model + Nengo SSN in Python as you have suggested. In the meantime I am working on a proposal for the Nengo Summer School as well where I’d like to explore this project further.