Over the last 1.5 years, I worked with two Western automotive tier-1 suppliers who use near- and far-shoring to develop most parts of their infotainment systems. Both suppliers use offshoring to reduce their development costs. But how can these offshoring projects be cheaper if a good developer is easily 10-20 times more productive than an average developer?
Read More »Offshoring Must Be About Finding Good Developers
QA finds many bugs that are very easy to catch. Builds contain warnings and runs error messages and even violated assertions. Coding guidelines and good coding practices are ignored. Unit tests are only written to drive line coverage up. Acceptance tests are missing. Code is committed although some tests are failing. Releases are prepared manually. All these symptoms are signs for unprofessional developers at work. So, what makes a developer truly professional?
Read More »What Makes a Developer Truly Professional
I wanted to replace many occurrences of
g_theme.themeDisplay(100, 80, 65)
by
g_theme.thSz([100, 80, 65])
in many QML files. The values of the three integer arguments varied from occurrence to occurrence. What I hoped for was that QtCreator’s search & replace function for regular expressions would support captured texts – the three arguments.
Read More »QtCreator – Search & Replace with Captured Texts
At Qt Developer Days 2014 in San Francisco, I gave a talk with title “Case Study: Driver Terminal for Forage Harvester”. I describe the technical challenges and their solutions when I helped Krone to develop the driver terminal of their new BigX 480/580 forage harvesters with QML, Qt and C++. Here are the slides of my presentation and an abstract.
Read More »Building HMI of Harvester with Qt
The University of Osnabrück invited me to give a talk about “HMIs of Agricultural Machines for 2016” at their COALA Symposium “Assistance Systems and Human-Machine Communication in Agricultural Engineering on October 30, 2014. Here is the abstract of the talk.
Read More »HMIs of Agricultural Machines for 2016
Agricultural OEM Krone bets on Qt software library for development of their terminal / First prototype read in less than three months
Big X 480 in maize harvest
585 horsepower, 15.6 litres engine displacement and an up to 9 metre wide cutterhead – forage harvesters are among the most powerful agricultural machines. It takes a lot more technology and know-how to drive such a vehicle than a car. The driver terminal of a forage harvester must process information from more than 30 components like motor, cutterhead, metal detector or grinder within tenths of a second. The terminal additionally provides a diagnosis system. The agricultural OEM Krone from Lower Saxony has built all these functions into the touch-screen terminal of its forage harvester Big X 480/580. The HMI software of the terminal was developed with the GUI and application library Qt.
Read More »Revolutionary HMI-Design of Forage Harvester
You have just installed a fresh Linux system. The next step is to build Qt from sources. You install the required Linux packages, configure and build Qt. After an hour or so, your build fails because a package is missing. You must start over again … and again … Wouldn’t it be nice to have a single command that installs all the required Ubuntu packages and save all these needless iterations?
Read More »One Command To Install All Ubuntu Packages for Qt 5 Build
When trying to build Qt 5.0.2 on my brand new Ubuntu 14.04 LTS system, the build failed with the following error message in the QtWebkit module:
generated/glslang_tab.cpp:1785:30: error: too few arguments to function 'int yylex(YYSTYPE*, void*)'
Read More »Taming Bison When Building Qt 5.0.x on Ubuntu 14.04
When my customers develop embedded systems, they face similar challenges:
Using examples from different industries, I’ll first elaborate on the challenges and then on how Qt can help us to solve these challenges. These challenges are typical for nearly every industry nowadays: automotive, agricultural, medical, manufacturing, home-appliance, home-automation – to name just a few.
Read More »Why Use Qt for Embedded Systems