Raspberry Pi

Compiling Qt 4.8.5 for Arietta G25

Phillip Schuster 5 Comments

Arietta G25

On my way building an automated wireless home automation system I have been finally been drawn to Embedded Linux. It just makes sense. Driving Internet of Things devices based on Arduino or other directly programmed MCUs is not very efficient. You will have so much work with just building up a network stack for example based around a CC3000 (Available as a nice breakout board from Adafruit). And you will just redevelop what is available for linux for decades. But: Embedded Linux is a beast of a monster. It’s just a whole different universe.

There are so many devices to choose from, the most prominent example being the Raspberry Pi of course. But I wanted a solution that I can use for a final product. For my work I need a very small device and I don’t need all these connectors (Ethernet, HDMI, etc) so I have been searching the large catalog of SoMs (System on Module) and found “Arietta G25” by Acmesystems. I really love this little device and Acmesystems provides a lot of tutorials and help documents to get started quickly.

Find more infos about their great product line-up here: acmesystems.it.

After I had attached a 3.5 TFT (acmesystems has a well written tutorial on how to do that) I wanted to use it for a great User Interface. As you don’t want to build your own UI-System you will most likely find Qt. Qt is more than just a UI frameworks. It’s awesome as it features more or less the same as the whole Apple iOS system. It features it’s own (great) IDE, Interface-Builder for doing design work the WYSIWYG way and features an almost complete Framework with hundreds of C++ classes for all kinds of stuff. They even have a well written network stack helping a lot in doing IoT stuff.

But: Getting Qt to run on an embedded linux device is not that easy. It’s hard work. Requires hours of hours of your time building stuff. Of course there are systems like Yocto and Buildroot – I just got started with them and so far I don’t see it’s easier. As acme systems provides a few images to get started, I wanted Qt installed based on the acme systems solution.

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Arduino vs Raspberry PI

Phillip Schuster Leave a comment

It all started with Chumby One

Being a programmer my whole live, I have never really touched the hardware. I have developed all sorts of Applications, Platforms, web pages, etc. Being fascinated in small and mini computers I found myself buying a Chumby One a few years ago. This rather useless device (for me) launched my interest in small computers and programming them.

The Raspberry PI came into my home

A few month later I bought a Raspberry Pi (Model B) and started developing an interface for my ADF-Scanner. I loved the scanner, but I hated to mount it to my laptop and spending an evening scanning papers coming in the last months. I wanted a solution that runs the scanner and uploads the generated PDF-Documents to my Home Server (QNAP NAS) so I could scan a paper every evening without hooking up USB cables. As a simple user interface I ordered a simple LCD-Screen, hooking it up to the Raspberry PI. I got results, but I really did not like it and it was very unreliable. The Raspi lost WLAN connectivity, crashed or stopped. I think it has been powering issues perhaps now fixed in B+. But even besides that programming the Raspberry PI did not made me happy. Why? Because I had to use the Linux Shell, because all just felt like programming ordinary Computers without learning anything new but being restricted to odd C++ Frameworks, etc… And I did miss my Cocoa Frameworks. When developing rather large scale applications I really miss the clean, fast and reliable Cocoa-APIs  for Mac OS X or iOS Programming. I ended up implementing a small App on my rather old Mac Mini running fine till today.

Anyone else out there who is waiting for a small, cheap ARM-based Apple Device with GPIOs that can be programmed with Cocoa?

Arduino got my heart

A few months ago I discovered Arduino for me. I have heard of it a few times before. But I never really got behind the idea until I took the time to read a few articles about it. For anyone who does not know what Arduino is, I try to sum it up in a few sentences:

Arduino is a convention and a product. The Arduino products are small mini computers based around rather slow Atmel Microprocessors, ranging from 8 MHz around 70 MHz and memory measured in KB and not GB! But it’s also a convention in that everything around Arduino is Open Source and there are a lot of rules all Arduino devices follow – if a device follows there rules it is Arduino compatible and should run everything that has been developed for Arduino before by other groups or person that followed these rules. What makes Arduino even more great is that every schematic is open, so you can build your own Arduino compatible device from scratch if you follow the basic principles defined by Arduino.

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