CMake

A Yocto Recipe for Qt Applications Built with CMake

by Burkhard Stubert
2024/03/122024/11/12

How hard can it be to write a Yocto recipe for building a Qt application with CMake? Actually, it turns out to be pretty hard. I have seen my fair share of slow-and-dirty workarounds (nothing is ever quick with Yocto, not even the diry workarounds) how to force the Qt application into the Linux image and onto the device. Over the years, I turned my own slow-and-dirty workarounds into a hopefully quick-and-clean solution. Here it comes.

A Basic Continuous Integration Pipeline with GitHub Actions

by Burkhard Stubert
2022/06/062022/06/06

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.

3 functions: 2 covered by tests, 1 uncovered

Building a CI Pipeline with CTest and CDash

by Burkhard Stubert
2022/05/02

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.

The HMI of the ROPA sugar-beet harvesters runs on a Topcon Opus A8 terminal.

Building Qt 6.2 For Old Yocto Versions

by Burkhard Stubert
2022/04/112022/11/23
5 Comments

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?

Visualising Module Dependencies with CMake and Graphviz

CMake uses Graphviz to generate dependency graphs between the targets of a CMake project like libraries and executables. The graphs help us get an idea of the software architecture and identify the dependency hot spots.

by Burkhard Stubert
2021/03/292021/04/06

Setting up QtCreator for cross-compilation with CMake took me 15-20 hours the first two or three times. The next half a dozen times took me… Read More »How to Set Up QtCreator for Cross-Compilation with CMake in 5 Minutes

Migrating the driver terminal of a sugar beet harvester from Qt 5 to Qt 6

Migrating a Harvester HMI from Qt 5.12 to Qt 6.2

by Burkhard Stubert
2021/01/172021/12/29

September 2021 saw the launch of Qt 6.2 – the first Qt 6 version with feature parity to Qt 5.15. I wanted to find out whether Qt 6.2 is fit for products. So, I migrated the HMI application of the ROPA sugar beet harvesters from Qt 5.12 over Qt 5.15 to Qt 6.2. The migration went very smooth and quick. And yes, Qt 6.2 is fit for products!

Build, deploy and run Qt application on embedded device by pressing the Run button in QtCreator.

Cross-Compiling Qt Embedded Applications with QtCreator and CMake

by Burkhard Stubert
2020/11/212021/11/25

We change the code of our Qt application in QtCreator and press the Run button to try the changes on an embedded device. QtCreator cross-compiles the application, deploys it to the device and runs it on the device. QtCreator performs these steps in a breeze, because we spent quite some time to define a QtCreator Kit. The fairly unknown script configure-qtcreator.sh from the Yocto layer meta-boot2qt automates most of the kit definition.

by Burkhard Stubert
2020/04/132021/06/19

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 target system.
You copy the application from the development PC to the target system with scp.
You start the application on the target system.

Wouldn’t you love to hit Ctrl+R in QtCreator and to have QtCreator perform the above four steps for you? Of course, you would! I’ll show you how in this post. Running an application on an embedded system will be the same as running the application on a PC.