KDAB at Embedded World 2023 March 14 - 16, Nürnberg, Germany
31.01.2023
We had a great show this year at our booth 4-302 at Embedded World 2023, where we showcased outstanding performance on cost-effective hardware featuring Qt, C++, Slint, Rust, and Flutter.
We know how complex and demanding software development for embedded devices can be. Our experts had you covered with your questions around choosing a framework, choosing a CPU, getting started with Embedded Linux, performance optimization, and of course all topics around Qt and tooling.
Thank you for coming by our place and for lots of interesting and engaging conversations! We look forward to seeing you again next year on April 9-11, 2024.
Leading Qt Expertise!
Being a Qt Platinum Partner, KDAB did – as every year – present a selection of excellent Qt-based customer showcases at this year’s Embedded World.
Often, when building embedded devices, the software is written from scratch for every product line or every new product generation. This year we showed you, how you can build one single software platform for a complete product line using different hardware. Or how you apply your software platform across different generations of a product line.
Customer Showcase Speidel: Maintaining a Product Line
Our customer Speidel is building a variety of beer brewing devices, both smaller ones for home brewing (up to 50l) and larger ones for commercial use (up to 1000l). KDAB helped Speidel to develop the touch control screens for their complete product line, using the same software platform, running on Embedded Linux and Yocto and built with Qt.
At our booth this year we had a comparison of three different display units for the Braumeister 20l, the Fermentmeister, and the Braumeister 500l.
KDAB’s Christoph Sterz got you covered with a demonstration, live from the booth – watch it here!
Miltenyi autoMACS: A top-of-the-line Magnetic Cell Separator
Miltenyi Biotec is a leading provider of products that empower the advancement of biomedical research and enable cell and gene therapy. KDAB is a key long-term partner for Miltenyi in developing a cross-product software platform that forms the basis for large parts of their product portfolio.
As an example, you can see the newest autoMACS cell separator with a modern Qt-based UI developed by KDAB live demonstrated from our booth by our colleague Christoph Sterz here!
Cxx-Qt – Safe Rust Bindings for Qt
A topic coming more and more into focus is the safety of programming languages. Rust being a safe language by design might be an interesting alternative for your coming embedded projects. But, can you integrate Rust with Qt? Yes, you can!
CXX-Qt is a set of Rust crates for creating bidirectional Rust ⇄ C++ bindings with Qt. It can be used to integrate Rust into C++ applications using CMake or used to build Rust applications with Cargo. CXX-Qt provides tools for implementing QObject subclasses in Rust which can be used from C++, QML, and JavaScript.
Watch the CXX-Qt demonstrated live from our booth by KDAB’s Andrew Hayzen here!
Developer Tools for Qt, C++, and Linux
As every year, we also demonstrated a selection of useful developer tools for debugging and profiling applications.
We showed GammaRay introspecting a Qt-based game at runtime on the SteamDeck (which is powered by KDE Plasma).
Watch a live demo from our expert Giuseppe D’Angelo here!
Further, there was also Hotspot, Heaptrack, and Clazy, which are all useful helpers to make your code more performant.
Last but not least, if you need an advanced docking solution for Qt applications, have a look at the KDDockWidgets demo.
Try them out!
Designing your first Embedded Linux device
Embedded Linux is widely used on embedded devices. Still, it is not trivial to implement. We have created a comprehensive four-part guide for „Designing your first Embedded Linux device“, starting from framing the development process, via choosing the software stack and the hardware to setting up your development environment.
You can read it online here.
Emerging UI Technologies
As a leading software consultancy specializing in UI development, KDAB certainly keeps a close eye on emerging UI technologies. This year, we displayed a selection of our R&D projects exploring Flutter and Slint UI at Embedded World.
One Platform – three frameworks (Qt/ Flutter/ Slint)
For a customer, KDAB created the same demo application using three different UI frameworks, namely Qt, Flutter, and Slint running on the same hardware (Toradex IMX8MP SOM and Torizon). The goal of this demo was to explore the strengths and limitations of each framework.
Learn more about our findings in this live demo video by Benny Sjöstrand here!
Flutter on Texas Instruments AM6254
During the past months, KDAB has helped Texas Instruments to implement Flutter on their AM6254 board. In the course of this project, KDAB was able to commit several improvements to the Flutter code and significantly improve the graphics performance on the AM6254 (up to 60 fps).
Check out the demo application with impressive animation demonstrated live by KDAB’s Pieter Scholtz and the creator of Flutter-Pi Hannes Winkler here!
