A client recently asked me to help them get a legacy HAL driver under test. They want to use TDD to maintain and extend the driver. We ran into a couple of problems, because the tests run on a 64-bit computer, whereas the production code runs on a 32-bit microcontroller. I’ll explain the problems and how to solve them.
Read More »Applying TDD to HAL Drivers with Memory-Mapped I/O
I never got the hang of UML: overly complicated, hard to understand, too close to code. Hence, I was skeptical about C4 diagrams when I… Read More »Visualising the Architecture of Qt Embedded Systems: Context and Container Diagrams
Kas makes the setup of a Yocto build environment super simple and super fast. We call kas with a project configuration file: kas-container build ./eu-terminal-distro.yml. Kas starts a Docker container, clones the layer repositories, initialises the Yocto configuration files (local.conf and bblayers.conf), and starts building the embedded Linux system. Most Linux BSP providers don’t make a kas configuration file available. I’ll show how to convert a repo manifest file into a kas configuration file in this post.
In a previous post, I built a basic CI pipeline with CTest that uploaded its results to a CDash board. It worked fine except that we had to start the pipeline manually from the command line. In this post, we define a pipeline with GitHub Actions that runs the CI pipeline whenever a developer pushes a code change to a GitHub repository.
Read More »A Basic Continuous Integration Pipeline with GitHub ActionsThe post Guide to the Total Cost of Ownership of Open-Source Software by Peter Schneider (The Qt Company) provides a smorgasbord of alternative facts why we should not use Qt LGPL but instead buy Qt Commercial. I can’t miss the irony that Schneider like many of his sales colleagues are bad-mouthing Qt LGPL to promote Qt Commercial. Qt LGPL and Commercial share the same code.
Read More »Critique: Guide to the Total Cost of Ownership of Open-Source Software
We can use CMake, CTest and CDash to build a basic Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline. The pipeline builds the applications, runs the tests, collects coverage information and uploads all the results to a dashboard on a web server. All this is controlled by one CMake script executed by CTest.
Read More »Building a CI Pipeline with CTest and CDashIn her post The five keys to a successful Google team, Julia Rozovsky summarises the recipe for successful teams: “Who is on a team matters less than how the team members interact, structure their work, and view their contributions.” Here is my commentary.
Read More »Reading: The five keys to a successful Google team
With Team Topologies, Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais have written a brilliant book how to create a high-performance software development organisation with the best team structure and interaction. Organisations are complex adaptive systems that change as the result of the interactions between their components (e.g., the teams) and the interactions with other systems (e.g., the rest of the organisation, competitors, suppliers, technology and market trends). The resulting changes are hard to predict and hard to control.
Read More »Book Review: “Team Topologies” by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais
The Qt version of an embedded Linux system is tied to the Yocto version. Yocto 2.7 (Warrior) comes with Qt 5.12, Yocto 3.1 (Dunfell) with Qt 5.14, Yocto 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4 with Qt 5.15 . There is no Yocto version with Qt 6 yet. How can we build Qt 6.2 against the SDK of old Yocto versions?
Read More »Building Qt 6.2 For Old Yocto Versions