This is a guide to configuring QT Creator to perform application updates to Yocto based devices incorporating OTA updates from the experts at Mender. You may be looking to deploy applications made in Qt onto your fleet of IoT devices.In a very significant tutorial on the Mender Hub community platform, embedded engineer Mirza Krak explains how to take an application developed in Qt Creator and deploy it securely and robustly over the air to embedded devices which may use Yocto, Debian or Ubuntu as their operating systems.
The board used in this tutorial is the popular Colibri i.MX 7 from Toradex. The exact specification is the Colibri iMX7D 1GB V1.1A SOM.
Configuring QT Creator for Yocto with OTA Updates
The tutorial demonstrates how to use a QT Creator as an input artifact to perform OTA application updates and to perform a phased roll out of the application updates over the air. Methods to automate the roll out process using the APIs from Qt and Mender are also explored along with an approach to integrate this roll out with image-based updates.
Requirements in preparation
Step by step, this tutorial describes the key prerequisites for doing the integration. These include:
The installation of Yocto as a supported Custom Linux distribution and dependencies installed on a workstation which is described in the Yocto Mega Manual, a Google Repo tool installed and in your path, a deployment environment using a desktop PC with Ubuntu 18.04 and Google Chrome as a web browser with sufficient memory and disk space. The Mender demo server should also be running with a Colibri Aster carrier board and the Colibri iMX7D 1GB V1.1A SOM. A USB flash drive connected to the Colibri iMX7D with appropriate b2qt-embedded-qt5-image-colibri-imx7-emmc.sdimg.gz file and u-boot.imx which will be both built during the tutorial. Finally, Qt Creator IDE should also be installed on the development PC with Qt examples.
Key steps in tutorial
The first step is the initial setup of the Boot 2 Qt environment The second step is to provision the device with the built images The third step is to integrate Mender with Qt Creator
The tutorial is designed to develop a Proof of Concept and requires rigorous evaluation and quality testing before it can be used for full production and industrial roll out.
The full detailed tutorial with the specific steps is available here on the Mender Hub.
