Our quest for a successful architecture of a harvester terminal continues. In this episode, we discuss when a system with a single application is good enough and when a system with multiple applications and a window manager is the better choice. Sometimes, a single-application system with a window manager is just the right choice.
Read More »Architecture of Qt Embedded Systems: Single vs. Multiple GUI ApplicationsSetting 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
Our Qt embedded system is displayed on a monitor mounted in portrait orientation. The system runs the Wayland compositor Weston as a window manager. HMI applications are shown rotated by 90 degrees – in landscape orientation. The system toolbar of Weston is visible. How can we configure Weston so that the applications are shown in portrait orientation and so that the system toolbar is removed?
Read More »Showing Wayland Compositor Fullscreen in Portrait Orientation
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!
Read More »Migrating a Harvester HMI from Qt 5.12 to Qt 6.2
Which system-on-chip is best suited for your Qt embedded system? Should you build a custom Linux system with Yocto, use a container OS or a desktop Linux? Should you use Qt Commercial or Qt LGPLv3? How will the system be updated? What are the operating conditions of the system? How does the system communicate with sensors, ECUs and the cloud?
This is only a small selection of the 50+ questions in this post. You best tackle these questions early in the project. Fixing wrong decisions becomes exponentially harder with the duration of the project. Your decisions can make or break a project.
Read More »Architecture of Qt Embedded Systems: Getting Started
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.
Read More »Cross-Compiling Qt Embedded Applications with QtCreator and CMake
A fairly common anti-pattern found in Qt applications is to derive a class MyApplication from QApplication and to have it hand out pointers to a… Read More »Breaking Dependency Cycles in Qt Applications
I evaluated the dependency analyser CppDepend on a real-life embedded application. My goal was to find all dependency cycles between classes in the application. I… Read More »CppDepend: A C++ Dependency Analyser
In a webinar organised by The Qt Company on 8 July 2020, I showed how QtCreator builds an embedded application against a Qt SDK encapsulated in a Docker container. QtCreator doesn’t know which Yocto version was used for building the Qt SDK and which environment variables must be set for the SDK. QtCreator forwards the CMake calls for configuring, building and staging the application to the container, which executes these calls in the right environment.
Read More »Webinar: Building Embedded Applications from QtCreator with Docker