Qt5 and the Raspberry Pi
The Qt community has been doing some great stuff with their Raspberry Pis. (It’s been pointed out to me in the comments that half of you don’t know what Qt is. Here’s Wikipedia on the subject, which is less long-winded than I would be.) First up, some video from Kaitsu, who ported his Qt5 Cinematic Experience demo to the Pi (watch those shaders go!):
Sources and more are available at Kaitsu’s blog.
Then there’s this Qt5 Wayland compositor demo from Samuel Rødal.
Samuel says that this Wolfenstein/workspace mashup also runs on the Pi. (Source code for this one is on Github, and we love it.)
And then there’s this trail emitters demo from Topguyz.
Demos like this get very excited about what you might be able to see on the Raspberry Pi soon. There’s potential to do some really cool stuff with the Pi and Qt5; and we’ve a feeling that the surface has barely been scratched. Seen or made something brilliant with Qt5 on a Raspberry Pi? Let us know!
31 comments
Me
It would have been nice to see a one-liner of what QT is!
liz
Sorry; that’s me assuming you all know already, which is bad and wrong. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(framework)
Dan Ankers
I’m confused – I thought that Wayland would not run on the Pi at present. That Wolfenstein example looks stunning, though!
Mick
It isn’t a pi, just a Wayland example
Dan Ankers
The clip above says “QT5 and Wayland on the Raspberry Pi,” and the Wolfenstein workspace runs on the Pi.
asb
Check out of the explanation from Samuel elsewhere in this comment thread. QtWayland will work (with QtWayland clients).
Krzysztof
I managed to compile and run that ‘wolf3d’ like compositor on my RPi without any problem.
Matthew
Where I can find Wayland for RPI? It’s available for testing?
Krzysztof
I installed wayland from raspbian repo and compiled qtwayland plugin against that lib. So far it works OK.
Kevin B
Haha just at the moment I ‘m building Qt5 for my Framboise.Pi this post pops up!
Indeed the new qpa (Qt platform abstraction) system offers a broad field of possibility. Now we can make our own compositor/window manager in Qt. That fits so many projects for Rrapsbery Pi.
The Maze compositor is great example of how to use this new technology with wayland, and compose windows in a 3d world!
A big Bravo and thanks to the Qt experts working the QtOnPi projects.
Kevin B
For those who wants to use Qt5 and qtwayland on RPi follow this link :
http://qt-project.org/wiki/RaspberryPi
P.S :
It’s still a bit tricky, I’m not sure we need to “cd src” during the qtwayland building phase, just cd qtwayland, qmake … , make. and reverse subdir target in qtwayland.pro ?
Samuel
QtWayland works on the Raspberry Pi because it has a custom buffer sharing backend using the Broadcom global image extension that the graphics driver on the Raspberry Pi exposes. There is no “official” support for Wayland, but Qt 5 based compositors and clients can use the Wayland protocol together with accelerated compositing. Currently there are no Qt 5 packages, so it’s necessary to build your own Qt, and some good instructions for doing so on Raspbian can be found here: http://qt-project.org/wiki/RaspberryPi_Beginners_guide
Hopefully in time there will be packages available for easier access :)
Ian Monroe
Hey sroedal. :)
Have you guys looked into Yocto? It’s basically Gentoo for folks cross-compiling. I’m moving countries next week but I want to get a Pi and look into this. Basically it’d be nice to have the ‘how to build’ rules in a git repo. Some are already working on it, would make sense to add Qt to the packages:
http://www.pimpmypi.com/blog/blogPost.php?blogPostID=7
Ian Monroe
Just found https://github.com/nezticle/RaspberryPi-BuildRoot in this thread. It already achieves distro-in-a-git-repo. Awesome. :)
Krishna
I use to wonder about animation performance with only 256 MB RAM on Pi. QT performance is very impressive.
SvOlli
Liz,
you also might want to take a look the http://bit.ly/Q6fqf5 to see what the demo scene is doing with this fine peace of hardware.
psergiu
O.M.G. !! And a bunch of them also have the source code !
Try them, people (for the older ones, you will find the download links in the comments)
Narishma
The older ones are just ports.
Johan
Don’t forget that Qt has a lot of really nice base classes, so it is so much more than just flashy graphics.
So as they ended one of the videos, Qt FTW ;)
Kamal
Can you provide any details how the desktop hardware acceleration is achieved, can the same results be achieved in regular X drivers?
Nezticle
These demos are using the eglfs platform plugin which uses EGL to provide Qt 5 with OpenGL surfaces to render to. All of these demos are done outside of X11, and the same results would not be possible in X11 on the Pi.
Kamal
Isn’t writing a new X11 driver that makes use of eglfs possible?
Matthew
Some time ago I’ve found a pre-build version on QT for RPI with a guide on using qtCreator for developing QT application and deploy directly on RPI.
Can someone provide me tha link? I cannot find it anymore.
Thanks
Paulo Pinheiro
I think there is no one making the deb packages of Qt5, so you may have to build it. Check http://qt-project.org/wiki/RaspberryPi_Beginners_guide
Jeff Tranter
I recently made a webcast about Qt and Raspberry Pi. You can find it at http://www.ics.com/learning/icsnetwork/
Nezticle
I’m glad to seem some more interest in Qt 5 on Raspberry Pi. I’ve actually been maintaining Qt 5 packages (including QtWayland) for my Raspberry Pi fork of BuildRoot here: https://github.com/nezticle/RaspberryPi-BuildRoot
All of the above projects can be built using the default profile.
TopguyZ
Good work on the PI-BuildRoot btw. I tested your tools also after my experiments with QtonPI.
But since I’m a debian-head I have managed to get Qt5 working within Raspbian now. If someone know a good guild for creating debian-packages of Qt5 I would be grateful.
And thanks to the blog for using my particletest video ;-)
Samuel
There’s a discussion ongoing on the qtonpi mailing list regarding debian-packages for Raspbian at the moment: http://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/qtonpi/2012-September/001040.html
If you’re interested in joining the discussion: http://qt-project.org/wiki/QtonPi-Collaborate
Tomo
Is there a tutorial anywhere as to how to set up a cross-compilation environment under Windows?
The guides I’ve found are all for Linux compiling machines, and most include a fair bit of ‘here be dragons’ (or big scripts to avoid those dragons) which makes me think I probably won’t get it running alone.
I just want to add Qt-on-Pi as a compilation target in QtCreator on my existing Windows box.
Mullet
Why on earth do you have to jump through a bajillion hoops just in order to get QT running on RPI? If someone just put in the minuscule amount of effort required to actually make life easier on the actual developers, maybe some really interesting stuff could be created.
Jackokring
Yep,I’m stuck using PC to develop Qt 5.1 apps, for later adapting to Pi. No apt-get yet.
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