15. Februar 2009
On thursday I went to a hands-on workshop held by taskit here in Berlin to learn more about the Panel-Card which is developed and sold by taskit. The Panel-Card is an embedded system that is a bit bigger than a 3,5″ LCD containing a complete embedded Linux system with 3,5″ TFT display, optional ethernet and touch panel.
It was the first workshop held by taskit. At the begining every participant got a virtual machine containing a ready-to-use Linux with devloper tools and examples. In addition everyone got an evaluation kit of the Panel-Card equiped with a touch panel and ethernet.
After we spend some time to make the virtual machine run on every notebook, we were able to implement our first example application. It was a typical embedded „Hello World“ by letting some LEDs blink. This application was implemented as a Linux application with memory mapping and direct access to the IO registers of the Atmel ARM chip. The IDE was based on eclipse which I’m using for my Java development since years. So I felt very comfortable right from the beginning. Source level debugging was also integrated into the IDE so the whole compile-deploy-debug cycle could be executed inside the IDE. By the way one delegate used a Netbook and execution speed of the virtual machine and development tools was very good.
In the second part we learned about how to build a custom kernel. In this case we added a driver for the touch screen mounted on the display of our Panel-Card. This was quite easy since all tools were already installed on the development system and on the target system so we only had to issue one or two commands.
The third part was a short introduction to Qt development with a practical exercise. We had our first application up in less than five minutes. Although it only consisted of an empty window I was excited how fast and easy this basic application worked including a mouse pointer that could be moved by using the touch screen.
A few minutes later we were able do turn the LEDs on the board on and off by tapping buttons on the screen.
The workshop was a bit problematic at the beginning but was at all very good. I’ve learnd a lot and will definitively look more into Qt on embedded systems. I had never expected that it is so easy to get started with UI based applications on an embedded platform.