Qt for MCUs supports some of the popular microcontroller platforms out-of-the-box. Although this is sufficient in a lot of cases, there is a growing demand to support other hardware platforms.

For this reason, Qt Quick Ultralite offers a set of platform abstraction APIs. These APIs enable third parties to easily port Qt Quick Ultralite to their hardware platforms, and help them achieve faster time-to-market.

This porting guide provides step-by-step instructions guiding you through the process of porting Qt Quick Ultralite to a new hardware platform. Porting Qt Quick Ultralite to a new board will be done in phases to make the process easier. With each phase one new part will be ported.

For a description of the general abstractions and components see Qt Quick Ultralite Platform Abstraction Architecture

Phase 1: Basic setup

1. Prerequisites for porting Qt Quick Ultralite to a new platform
2. Project setup
3. Creating the platform configuration file
4. Defining default variables for the platform
5. Linker script setup
6. Implementing basic functions
7. Implementing logging support
8. Creating flash targets
9. First Qt Quick Ultralite application on new platform

Phase 2: Graphics

10. Framebuffer requirements
11. Getting graphics on the screen

Phase 3: Touch input

12. Implementing custom queues
13. Handling touch input

Phase 4: Optionals and Optimizations

This section contains optional and improvement tasks that depend on your specific board and OS. Because most MCUs have some kind hardware accelerated graphics, it is highly recommended to implement at least these to get the full performance out of your device.

Recommended improvements

• Hardware accelerated blending
• Memory allocation in Qt Quick Ultralite platform abstraction
• Improving startup time using a preload allocator
• Preloading Qt Quick Ultralite internal resources

Improvements depending on HW capabilities

• Implementing hardware layer support
• Implementing vector graphics support

Useful for testing

• Testing a new platform
• Porting DeviceLink Communication
• Implementing performance metrics platform APIs

QtCreator integration

• Creating a platform kit file for QtCreator
• Installation and using it in QtCreator

Others

• Using a custom toolchain
• Partial Framebuffer
• Porting Qt Quick Ultralite to an RTOS
• Handling keyboard input
• Handling custom input devices