Offshoring Becomes Too Expensive
After offshoring and near-shoring, there is a new outsourcing trend: domestic outsourcing. For example, a company in California outsources work to a company in Indiana… Read More »Offshoring Becomes Too Expensive
Burkhard Stubert
CMake Cross-Compilation Based on Yocto SDK
We have succeeded in building embedded Linux with Yocto for a quad-core NXP i.MX6 (ARM Cortex-A9). Next, we want to cross-compile our own Qt application. As we use CMake for building our Qt application, we must create a CMake toolchain file. I am going to give a line-line by line explanation of the CMake toolchain file. I used Yocto Morty and CMake v3.5.1 (as it comes with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS).
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30% Faster Startup Thanks to QtQuick Compiler
Update: Since Qt 5.12, the QtQuick compiler has been available under LGPLv3. Even if you don’t have a commercial Qt license, you will be able to enjoy a significantly faster startup of embedded QML applications.
It is not easy to find hard data about how much the QtQuick compiler can speed up the startup of real-life application. As I had some time on my hands this weekend, I measured the startup times of the HMI of a maize harvester running on a quad-core NXP/Freescale i.MX6 (Nit6Q_W_BCOM). Using the QtQuick compiler from Qt 5.7 brings the startup time from 2.72s down to 1.91s – a speedup of 30%!
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Finding Projects as a Freelance Software Developer
Three years ago aged 45, I started as a freelance software developer in Southern Germany. It were three pretty amazing years. I had paid work for 522.5 days of 750 working days, which amounts to nearly 70% of total working days. My hourly rate was roughly 94 Euros with 8 hours per day. Additionally, I passed on 285 days of work to other developers at a rate of 61 Euros. Despite this success, finding projects still feels a bit like black magic. Sometimes I could have got three projects at the same time. Sometimes I struggled for several months to find the next project. I want to share my experience in finding projects: what worked for me and what didn’t.
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Is a C++ Float Variable Ever Equal to 0.0f?
The answer to the question in the title is a resounding “maybe”. The writer of a piece of code wanted to avoid a division-by-zero error by checking whether the divisor of type float is not equal to 0.0f.
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Running a QML HMI on an ARM11 without OpenGL
Recently, I brought up Qt 5.5 on a Freescale i.MX35, which has an ARM11 CPU but no OpenGL support. Despite the missing OpenGL, I wanted to write the HMI with QML. The additional challenge was that the cross-compilation toolchain was 32-bit, but I wanted to use my standard 64-bit Ubuntu. I’ll show in this post how to set up the 32-bit toolchain and rootfs on my 64-bit Ubuntu machine, how to configure and build Qt 5.5 from the sources, and how to run a hello-world application written in QML on the i.MX35.Read More »Running a QML HMI on an ARM11 without OpenGL