cmake

Creating A Custom Yocto Layer

by Burkhard Stubert
2022/11/072022/11/07

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.

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

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.

by Burkhard Stubert
2020/03/212022/07/10

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 and restricts the installation to this absolute path. Second, it forces us to create a tarball of the installation directory on the PC manually. Let us fix these two deficiencies.