Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-09-08 | 
6 Comments to Read
I recently wrote an article about best practices building Qt applications with OpenEmbedded, and it occured to me that I should write an equivalent article for Gtk+ applications. The same points apply — put your application source in a SCM system, and put the install logic in the application source (read the above article). The [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-08-06 | 10 Comments to Read
This article describes how to cross compile a Qt application (named qt_tutorial) with OpenEmbedded, and several best practices you should consider. OpenEmbedded currently includes fairly good support for building Qt — both Qt Embedded and Qt X11. OE also includes a number of qt classes that make building Qt applications easy. One of the main [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-06-20 | Read the First Comment
Occasionally I am asked how Embedded Linux compares with Windows CE. I have spent the past 5 years doing mostly embedded Linux development, and the previous 5 years doing mostly WinCE development with a few exceptions, so my thoughts are no doubt a little biased toward what I understand best. So take this with a [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-05-26 | Be the First to Comment
I’m currently dealing with a programming problem where I need access to several 64MB, file-backed data structures concurrently on an Embedded Linux system that only has 64MB of RAM. The data structures are fairly sparse (mostly zero data), and I typically only need to access small portions of them at any particular time. There is [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-01-21 | 4 Comments to Read
Several of my customers have built applications using the GTK+ tookit. While GTK+ works fairly well for what we have done, I have been wondering how the performance compares on the new Omap3 processors from TI. As we are evaluating the OMAP3 for several projects, I did a simple comparison with an existing application. Below [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-01-10 | 3 Comments to Read
With Linux, some of the things that seem like they should be easy are not — at least at first glance. For example, how do you read an interrupt driven GPIO input in a Linux application? With simpler microcontroller systems, this is straightforward, but with a system like Linux, you have to navigate through several [...]
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Recently I’ve been following the Vala programming language and using it some in embedded systems. Vala is a new programming language that aims to bring modern programming features to GNOME developers without imposing additional runtime requirements and without using a different ABI compared to applications and libraries written in C. A few notes and observations [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-01-09 | Read the First Comment
How does one implement support for printing in embedded systems? I recently had the opportunity to add printing support to an embedded Linux system. The device is an industrial touch screen powered by a Compulab cm-x270 module (PXA270 CPU), and runs a GTK+ application. The customer is implementing a device calibration system where customers bring [...]
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In a previous article (http://bec-systems.com/web/content/view/78/9/ ), I covered some of the basics of Linux timers. Any time you are doing any type of fixed time delay in a program, you should really be using monotonic times, so the delay will not be affected by system time changes. In an effort to save cost, some embedded [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on | Be the First to Comment
Have you ever wondered what is the best way to implement periodic tasks in Linux applications — something better than usleep()? This article covers a number of issues related to this subject including real-time tasks, the different timers available, timer resolution, and how to implement periodic tasks accurately so that error is not accumulated. The [...]