Introduction to LCD Displays and GUI Applications

This is the first video in a set of three on Qt application development on the Beaglebone or any other embedded Linux device. This video introduces the LCD module that I used, reviews it and then discusses how you can install it and develop very basic on-board GTK GUI applications.

 

Setting up QT Creator for C++ ARM Embedded Linux Development

This leads to the second video where I set up a full toolchain for Qt application development under embedded Linux (Qt for embedded devices). This toolchain allows us to cross compile Qt applications for the Beaglebone, deploy the applications directly to the beaglebone with a single click and even use remote debugging using gdbserver to diagnose any problems with our applications. The main use of this platform is for GUI application development when a LCD module, or external display is present.

Thad Failor (via YouTube) provides some information on how to deal with the requirement to execute . /usr/local/angtrom/arm/environment-setup in advance of starting QtCreator. The steps are:
– Open Qt Creator
– Open your project
– Click Projects under [Your Beaglebone Kit]
– Click Build
– Scroll down to the bottom and click details
– Click on Batch
– Edit Paste the contents of the “. /usr/local/angstrom/arm/enviro­­nment-setup” removing any of the “export” commands.

 

Example Qt Embedded Linux Application on the Beaglebone

This is the third video in a set of three on Qt application development on the Beaglebone or any other embedded Linux device. This toolchain allows us to cross compile Qt applications for the Beaglebone, deploy the applications directly to the beaglebone with a single click and even use remote debugging using gdbserver to diagnose any problems with our applications. The main use of this platform is for GUI application development when a LCD module, or external display is present.

In this the final video in this series I demonstrate an example application that uses a BMA 180 accelerometer and LED to act as output/input devices and I provide the full source code. I explain how the source code is structured and how the physical circuit was configured.

 

Source Code

The full source code for the code in these videos is available on my github site. You can clone this by typing:

at the Linux prompt, or by installing some git tools under Windows.

The QtCreator project file is:

And the core C++ files are mainwindow.h:

And mainwindow.cpp