My Talk “A Successful Architecture for Qt Embedded Systems” at Qt Day Italy 2021

Creating an architecture means answering many questions about the ecosystem, in which the Qt embedded system operates. While the questions are very similar for all Qt embedded systems, the answers and their priorities differ. So, you should be able to transfer the questions and answers from my running example, a harvester terminal, to your system.

On 8 July 2021, I gave a webinar titled “A Successful Architecture for Qt Embedded Systems” at Qt Day Italy 2021. Here is a commented table of contents of my talk.

• Software Architecture
  • Applications. The ports-and-adapters architecture (a.k.a. the hexagonal architecture) is a good base architecture for many Qt embedded systems.
  • Machine Communication. A typical system provides three adapters for machine communication: one for the real communication, one for simulation and one for testing.
  • Window Manager. Single-application systems don’t need window managers. Custom window managers based on a Wayland compositor are the right choice for multi-application systems.
  • Operating Systems. Custom-built Linux distributions are the default choice for operating systems.
• Hardware Architecture
  • System with Multiple Displays. One powerful system, which drives multiple displays and incorporates many machine controllers, a Super-ECU, seems to be the future-proof way forward.
  • Operating Conditions. Temperature, light, dust, water and vibration (often forgotten) have a strong influence on the system architecture.
  • SoC Selection. Given the architecturally significant requirements gathered before, we select the right SoC (system-on-chip) for the harvester terminal.

Here are the slides from my talk.

The talk is a compact version of the series Architecture of Qt Embedded Systems. It summarises the past posts and gives an outlook on future posts.