December 2020 saw the launch of Qt 6 – the first new major version since 2012. I wanted to find out how fit Qt 6.0 is for Qt embedded systems. I took the driver terminal of the ROPA sugar beet harvesters and migrated it from Qt 5.12 to Qt 6.0 as a side project....
Category: CMake
Cross-Compiling Qt Embedded Applications with QtCreator and CMake
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...
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...
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...
Deploying Qt Projects to Embedded Devices with CMake
When you run a Qt project, QtCreator first deploys the project to a remote embedded Linux device via ssh and then runs the executable on the remote device. This feature enables nearly instant feedback how your Qt application works on the embedded device. Deployment works fine with the INSTALLS variable of qmake. It does...
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...