We want to develop the Internet radio application for the Raspberry Pi in the same way as for a PC. We change the source code in QtCreator and run the application. QtCreator cross-builds the application on the PC for the Raspberry Pi, deploys it with SSH to the Pi and runs it on the...
Category: Blog
Qt Embedded Systems – Part 1: Building a Linux Image with Yocto
In Part 1 of the series on Qt Embedded Systems, we build a custom Linux image with Yocto for the Raspberry Pi 3B. When we power on the embedded device, it starts an Internet radio application – called Cuteradio. This QML application is very simple: it can only play a single, hard-wired station. Despite...
Book Review: “Accelerate” by Nicole Forsgren et al.
The book Accelerate – Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations by Nicole Forsgren et al. is an eye opener and game changer for everyone involved in software development. Nicole provides empirical evidence why teams that apply best practices like test and deployment automation, continuous integration, loosely coupled architectures and team empowerment by far...
Docker Builds from QtCreator
On your development PC, you simply hit Ctrl+R (Run) in QtCreator to build and run your Qt application. When you want to run the application on an embedded system, you must perform four tasks: You cross-build the Qt application for the target embedded system in a Docker container. You stop the application on the...
FOSS Qt Releases Delayed by up to 12 Months?
On 8 April 2020, Olaf Schmidt-Wischhöfer wrote in an email to the KDE community (emphasis mine): last week, suddenly informed both the KDE e.V. board and the KDE Free QT Foundation that the economic outlook caused by the Corona virus puts more pressure on them to increase short-term revenue. As...
Creating Simple Installers with CPack
In my recent post Benefits of a Relocatable Qt, I explained how to relocate Qt from a build server to a developer PC and from the PC to an embedded system. Qt is installed in three different locations. My solution has two small deficiencies. First, it sets the install rpath to an absolute path...
Benefits of a Relocatable Qt
Bob builds Qt for the development team on a fast compute server. He packs Qt into a tarball and hands the tarball to his teammates. Alice installs the Qt tarball on her PC in a directory that differs from the installation directory used by Bob. As the target embedded system runs on an AMD...
Less Love for FOSS Qt Users
From Qt 5.15, The Qt Company make their offering a bit more inconvenient for FOSS users. They announced three changes: A Qt account is mandatory to download binary Qt packages. The offline installer is not available to FOSS users any more. LTS (long-term support) releases are not available to FOSS users, once the next...
QML Engine Deletes C++ Objects Still In Use – Revisited with Address Sanitizers
Two years ago, I spent three days to figure out why the driver terminal of a sugar beet harvester crashed (see my original post). The crash happened after going through the same six-step interaction at least four times. The reason was that the C++ code accessed an object that the QML engine had already...
Introduction to the SAE J1939 Standard
In the early days of controller area networks (CAN), every device manufacturer interpreted CAN frames in its own proprietary way. When you changed the engine of a harvester from Volvo to MAN, you would have to reimplement the communication with the engine from scratch. Fendt tractors wouldn’t be able to communicate with John Deere...