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A Yocto Recipe for Qt Applications Built with CMake

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.

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Creating A Custom Yocto Layer

After having built the reference Linux image from a SoM, SoC or terminal maker and having run it on the board, we must inevitably custom-tailor this image to our needs. We must create our own Yocto layer. We must remove all the unnecessary packages and make our core application start automatically on power-up. Here is a step-by-step guide how to turn the application layer for a Toradex Verdin iMX8M Plus board into our own custom layer. The guide should also work for other boards.

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A Basic Continuous Integration Pipeline with GitHub Actions

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.

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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

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.

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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 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.

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