Digia unveils powerful new Qt 5 functionality for embedded system developers

Demonstrations on a variety of hardware platforms and operating systems – including Raspberry Pi, Freescale i.MX6, Embedded Linux, QNX Neutrino, Android and Windows – revealed the power and versatility of Qt 5 and how it can be used to create native applications that are easily portable to other platforms.

Qt is an open source framework developed and maintained by Digia and the Qt Project. It enables developers to realise applications and companies to create their own software ecosystems fast. Qt enables the creation of the type of rich graphics and smooth animations that users increasingly expect, as well as rigorous and complex applications with intuitive UIs. And, because the applications are native to their respective systems, they extract the maximum performance from the underlying hardware.

Demonstrations included:
• Qt 5 on Raspberry Pi – the Scene Graph function in the Qt Quick 2 UI creation kit provides unparalleled rendering performance on constrained hardware platforms
• Qt 5 on the QNX platform - Cinematic Experience – collects many of the new Qt 5 Qt Quick 2 features into the same user experience demo application including particles, sprites path animation and custom shaders
• Qt 5 on Embedded Linux Smart Home Control – household elements including heating, blinds, windows and lighting are controlled in response to changes in weather conditions, which can be adjusted within the system
• Qt on an Android Base Layer – A demonstration of a Qt application running on an Android base layer, which puts Qt on top as a graphical interface with the goal to make embedded development on Linux as seamless as possible.
• Automotive 3D human-machine interface (HMI) – QML and Qt OpenGL C++ API enable easy leveraging of 3D technologies and OpenGL hardware acceleration
• Qt on VxWorks - VxWorks 6.9.2 on Mistral OMAP 3 EVM showing an interactive 3D desktop using OpenGL ES2 graphics

Key benefits of Qt 5 include: graphics quality; performance on constrained hardware; cross-platform portability; support for C++11; HTML5 support with QtWebKit 2; a vastly improved QML engine with new APIs; ease of use and compatibility with Qt 4 versions.

Qt’s ability to deliver impressive graphics has been enhanced with the use of OpenGL ES (the version of the graphics application programming interface designed specifically for embedded systems and mobile devices). This makes it easier to develop and deploy rich graphics with velvet-like animations and transitions as well as smoothly-rendered 2D and 3D animations on high-end architectures as well as on devices with relatively limited performance, such as mobile phones, tablets and low-cost development platforms including Raspberry Pi.

Cross-platform portability is made even simpler in Qt 5 due to a new modularized code base, consisting of essentials and add-on modules, which enable the system code size to be reduced. The consolidation of the Qt Platform Abstraction layer also emphasizes cross-platform portability by enabling the ease of development for multiple-target deployment, bringing freedom to the developer.

Qt supports embedded operating systems including Embedded Linux, Windows Embedded and the most widely deployed real-time operating systems for embedded devices – Wind River VxWorks, QNX Neutrino and Green Hills Software INTEGRITY – together with all major desktop operating systems (including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux) and popular mobile OSes.