boot2qt for raspi 3

[Kachoraza]

I have never used boot2qt and recently came to know that embedded applications developed with qt can be installed on target systems without an underlying OS. Can someone suggest or share a link to some good tutorial about using boot2qt, keeping in mind that I am using open source qt on a ubuntu machine. I would appreciate if you keep in mind that I am totally new to this idea of boot2qt. Thanks in advance.

[SGaist]

Hi,

I might be wrong but without any OS sounds rather like the Qt For MCU product, doesn't it ?

[Kachoraza]

@SGaist I don't know actually. I understand that boot2qt does use linux kernel, but for me the important thing is not making application for bare-bone board, but something, where the board has minimum to load, so that it would bootup very fast, as if turning on a stereo. What I mean is that when you bootup raspbian it takes a real while, but if you are integrating the board into car, the device should start immediately as the key turns on. So from this perspective I started looking around and I came across boot2qt.
I would appreciate if you could suggest some tutorial, which is really grass-root level in this respect.

[Kachoraza]

@SGaist I downloaded open source qt 5.15.1, but qt for MCU is not included in it. Is it only available with commercial license or is it possible to find an open source version?

[SGaist]

AFAIK and based on this page, I'd say commercial.

You can contact the Qt Company for more information.

[Pradeep P N]

Hi @SGaist

I was trying with Creating Raspberry Pi 3 image using Boot2Qt project and some similar yocto build process but some reason it did not work for me.
Is it allowed still to do it or we get the Boot2Qt only with Qt Commercial ?.

[SGaist]

@Kachoraza said in boot2qt for raspi 3:

@SGaist I don't know actually. I understand that boot2qt does use linux kernel, but for me the important thing is not making application for bare-bone board, but something, where the board has minimum to load, so that it would bootup very fast, as if turning on a stereo. What I mean is that when you bootup raspbian it takes a real while, but if you are integrating the board into car, the device should start immediately as the key turns on. So from this perspective I started looking around and I came across boot2qt.
I would appreciate if you could suggest some tutorial, which is really grass-root level in this respect.

Sorry, I misread that one. Your original post mentions no OS which implies that you want to run your application on bare-metal. As for designing an automotive related product, it will really depend on what you want to provide. Raspbian is a general purpose Linux distribution, so it's not expected to boot super fast. If you want to stay with it, you'll have to tweak the kernel yourself. However having a lightweight distribution generated using Boot2Qt is a good idea to avoid all the dependencies that in fact you do not need.

But first and foremost, you need to know precisely what your device will do, require, etc. To decide whether Boot2Qt or Qt for MCUs is the best product.

@Pradeep-P-N "it did not work for me" is way too vague. You need to provide more details about what is going wrong (preferably in a new thread of yours). AFAIK the meta layers are available. The Boot2Qt product itself with its tooling / reference implementation etc. is a commercial offering.

[Kachoraza]

@SGaist I am putting in 2 boards. One to use as instrument cluster/diagnostic panel, and the other one to act as media/navigation center. After reading your comments, I now guess that I can use boot2qt for the media/navigation panel, but for the instrument cluster I think the best thing will be MCU. But on the other hand since MCU is only available under commercial license, which I cannot afford, as this is not a commercial project, I will have to stick with boot2qt and explore my options of making booting even faster for the instrument panel. What kind of tweaking are you talking about in raspbian to make it faster at boot?

[SGaist]

Disable all the things you do not need to run your board.

You might want to check on uGFX from Simulton.

[Pablo J. Rogina]

@Kachoraza

You might want to check on uGFX from Simulton.

In addition to @SGaist suggestion, you may want to check LVGL as an option for creating GUI apps for MCUs.

[Pablo J. Rogina]

@Kachoraza said in boot2qt for raspi 3:

I now guess that I can use boot2qt ...
... under commercial license, which I cannot afford

Please be aware that from Boot to Qt page, it seems to require a commercial license as well, see license information.

So I gues that if going for free options, I'd say to use open source Qt for the RPi device, and some other graphic library (as the ones already suggested) for the MCUs