What You Need to Know About the Raspberry Pi Ecosystem

It's been more than six months since my last update, perfect time to review some of the recent happennings in the Raspberry Pi ecosystem. The biggest news was the launch of the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, announced appropriately on "Pi Day," March 14, 2018. An incremental update to the Pi 3 Model B,…

Raspberry Pi News Roundup

Since my last update there have been some new happenings in the Raspberry Pi community. Here's a look at a few of the most significant events. Raspberry Pi Zero W [Photo credit: raspberrypi-spy.co.uk] In late February 2017 the newest Raspberry Pi model was announced: the…

Qt Bluetooth on the Raspberry Pi 3

While much attention has been focused on the built-in WiFi hardware, the Raspberry Pi 3 (1) also ships with on-board support for Bluetooth. Bluetooth is a wireless technology for exchanging data over short distances using 2.4 GHz radio signals. When running the recommended Raspbian Linux…

Configuring Qt Creator for the Raspberry Pi

While it is not the only option, Qt Creator is the integrated development environment (IDE) of choice for Qt. It provides good support for developing for embedded systems, including cross-compiling, deploying to a target system, debugging and profiling. It's free, well …

Yocto on the Raspberry Pi

Yocto(1) is a software framework for embedded Linux systems. We've looked at it in previous blog posts(2). It forms the basis of many embedded Linux distributions, including The Qt Company's boot2qt that is part of their commercial product Qt For Device Creation(3). Knowledge of Yocto is a…

Raspberry Pi Update

It has been just over four months since my last blog post on the Raspberry Pi (1). Since then, the project has continued to move forward and I thought it was appropriate to write a new update. The Raspberry Pi 3 Raspberry Pi 3 (image credit: Tech Radar) In my last blog post I covered the…

Getting Started with MRAA on the Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi (1) is one of the more popular low-cost computers on the market. It has an ARM CPU, hardware video acceleration, RAM, SD card mass storage, and almost everything that a regular desktop computer has to offer at a fraction of the size and cost. It also has a set of GPIO (General…

Raspberry Pi Update

My last blog post on the Raspberry Pi was written last April, when I covered the release of the Raspberry Pi 2. Since then, a number of things have happened in the Raspberry Pi ecosystem and I thought it was an appropriate time for another update. Here is a list of some of the events that, in…

Qt on the Raspberry Pi 2

The Raspberry Pi 2 computer, released in February 2015, is the latest generation of Raspberry Pi hardware. It is a significantly faster machine than the original Raspberry Pi, with a new Broadcom BCM2836 system on a chip that has a quad-core ARM Cortex A7 CPU running at 900 MHz. The GPU is a…

2014 Year in Review

As the year draws to a close, I thought it would be good to take a look back at some of the major events of the Qt world in 2014. Qt is now on a regular schedule of two major releases per year. We saw Qt 5.3.0 (1) come out in May and Qt 5.4.0 (2) in December. More minor releases occur, as needed,…

Raspberry Pi Update

Since my last blog about the Raspberry Pi in August, there have been a number of interesting new developments and the Raspberry Pi project has continued to move ahead. As expected, the new Raspberry Pi Model A+ was released. With the Model A+, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has…

Summer Grab Bag

It's summertime here in the Northern hemisphere, and many people are on vacation (I just got back from a week off, myself). Despite that, we are very busy at ICS with consulting projects and preparing for the upcoming Qt Developer Days (1) conferences to be held in Berlin and San…

Retrocomputing: Motif and CDE

Introduction In this blog post, we'll look at a couple of older graphical user interface toolkits that were popular in the 1980s and 1990s. Why would anyone care about old software like this? One reason is purely for nostalgia, particularly if you used these systems back in the days when they…

The Raspberry Pi Camera Module

Introduction In this post we'll look at the Raspberry Pi camera module, a low cost hardware module that supports still picture and video recording and is the first official hardware add-on for the Raspberry Pi. We'll also look at the camera's features and specifications, how to set it up…

Building Qt and QtWayland for Raspberry Pi

This document will explain how to build Qt 5.2.0 beta1 and QtWayland for Raspberry Pi (http://www.raspberrypi.org/). The procedure will likely work with the Qt 5.2.0 release candidate and final release, once they become available. There are a variety of HOWTOs and other documents on the web on how…

Building Qt 5 on Raspberry Pi

This is a HOW TO guide for building Qt 5 for the Raspberry Pi, and building and deploying Qt 5 apps using Qt Creator. This guide will be using Raspbian “Wheezy”, a Debian based distro designed for the Raspberry Pi. This guide also assumes the use of Linux or UNIX on the workstation side. Note:…

Another Name Change

This week was another slow week as many people were off part of the week due to New Year's or extended holidays. PhoneGap, recently renamed to Apache Callback, is now being renamed as Apache Cordova. There is discussion on the mailing list about where the code repositories will reside. It may be…

Marketing Push

This week we did some marketing to promote the project. I made a posting to the callback developer mailing list and we put a link to this blog from the ICS web site. Quim Gil of Nokia kindly made a posting to the Nokia Qt blog. I also recorded a podcast with Mark Hatch for the ICS This Week in Qt…

Repos Moving

This week we finished implementing some Cordova APIs (at least for the Qt 4 version). Compass and Accelerometer are done and some of Events was implemented. Notification is done as is most of File support and we are starting work on Contacts and Camera. Note that I am going to start consistently…

Move to QML

Since the last posting we properly set up deployment of Cordova Qt for MeeGo Harmattan (e.g. the Nokia N9 phone). We also got Qt 5 packages including WebKit built for MeeGo Harmattan and tested it on a Nokia N9. Incidently, a big PR1.2 software update rolled out this week for MeeGo Harmattan…

Odds 'n Ends

Throughout this project one thing that has been constantly changing has been the source code repositories, both due to several project names changes and with the move to being run as an Apache project. This last week the old repository at http://github.com/cordova/cordova-qt was removed and…

Qt 5 Alpha Out, Raspberry Pi Shipping

Work has been slowing down somewhat as Qt 5 has been firming up for release. The Qt 5 alpha came out on April 3rd and we tested our code with it. Work is moving ahead for a Qt 5 beta release and then the 5.0.0 final this summer. Qt 4.8.1 also came out and we tested Cordova Qt with it. A 4.8.2…

Testing Continues

We've recently been running the Cordova tests and making some fixes to get them to run better. We've documented on the Wiki how to run the Cordova tests. See the section "Running Cordova Tests" at this wiki page. We hope to have a demo video up soon showing the tests running on the simulator and…

Please, may I have another slice of Raspberry Pi...

About three weeks ago, Nokia arranged for ICS to gain access to the Raspberry Pi board so that we could help with an exploratory open source effort to get Qt working on this platform. That is how I got my chance to hack some code for this amazing board. The idea was to get a bleeding edge version…

Qt Dev Days Munich Recap

Good talking to you all at Qt Dev Days Munich. We captured some of our Raspberry Pi thoughts in a podcast posted here: This Week in Qt Episode 23 We'll be at Dev Days in San Francisco beginning Nov 29 - hope to see you there!

Qt 5 + Raspberry Pi Demo

Here's a video of my colleague, Roland Krause, demonstrating Qt 5 + Raspberry Pi at Qt Dev Days in Munich. Stop by our booth in San Francisco next week to see it first hand...and for your chance to win one of your very own!

Raspberry Pi Giveaway from ICS at Qt Dev Days

Be sure to stop by the ICS stand at Qt Developer Days this week for a chance to win a Raspberry Pi. We'll be giving away 50 boards over the course of the conference!

70+ Raspberry Pi boards given away at Qt Developer Days

As part of the initiative to put Qt 5 on Raspberry Pi, ICS gave away over 70 Raspberry Pi boards to interested developers at Qt Developer Days last week. If you were one of the lucky winners, be on the lookout over the next few days for an email from ICS so you'll know how to go about receiving it…

Status Update

The Raspberry Pi folks report that the first batch of production boards is finally in production. The first 10,000 units should start becoming available around the end of this month. ICS should be getting a number of boards from this first batch which we will distribute among our developers. The…

Raspberry Pi is Shipping

The Raspberry Pi boards are now shipping in volume from the distributors and unboxing videos are showing up all over the Internet. If you were one of the winners of a board from ICS you should have received an e-mail today with the details on how to redeem your voucher. If not, check your spam…

Raspberry Pi at Qt Developer Days

We haven't blogged here for some time, in part because many of the folks at ICS have been very busy planning and preparing for the annual Qt Developer Days conferences in Berlin, Germany and Santa Clara, California. We had some coverage of the Raspberry Pi and Qt at the recent Qt Developer Days in…