ESPOO, Finland--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Qt Company today launched Qt for MCUs 1.0, which enables companies to create fluid, highly intuitive user interfaces (UIs) on cost-effective microcontrollers (MCUs). The new offering, leveraging the Qt Company’s existing tools and libraries, is now fully supported and is available for evaluation and purchase. Now companies can deliver better user experiences for displays powered by MCUs, while reducing their hardware costs. The toolkit serves a wide range of markets, including connected vehicles, wearables, smart homes, the industrial sector, and the medical sector.
Key features in Qt for MCUs 1.0
- Fits into an MCUs internal memory
- Bare metal, no RTOS needed
- Reuse competencies and UI assets between Qt Quick Ultralite and Qt Quick
- Localization for left-to-right languages
- Supported in Qt Creator v4.11
Main benefits
- Smartphone-like UX on low end hardware
- Reuse source code across ARM architectures
- Fast development with QML and Qt Tools
In today’s environment, manufacturers face high user expectations, faster product cycles, stagnant growth in the developer workforce, and margin pressure. In order to stay relevant, they must differentiate through software. Until now, Qt’s embedded offering has supported higher level microprocessing units (MPUs), but with Qt’s new offering, customers can leverage the same tools, technology, and skillsets across their entire product range and throughout their organization, reducing costs of hardware and maintenance by focusing on one technology for all their development work. Focusing on one technology approach also enables manufacturers to keep a consistent branded user experience across their entire product line and reuse code across hardware architectures.
Today’s devices are smarter and offer more advanced features and capabilities than ever before, which, in turn, has raised customer expectations for highly immersive and engaging applications and UIs. This is especially true for connected devices found in rapidly-growing sectors, such as connected vehicles (in-vehicle infotainment systems and clusters), wearables (fitness trackers, smart watches), the smart home (including appliances such as refrigerators and washing machines), industrial (handheld devices, measuring devices) and healthcare (medical devices). In order to meet and exceed these expectations, application developers and device creators must deliver an engaging, intuitive user experience that is on par with that of today’s smartphones while at the same time keeping their bill of materials low.
Qt for MCUs offers a comprehensive toolkit to enable new and existing users to deliver the user experiences their customers demand. Leveraging Qt’s popular QML technology and developer-designer tooling, Qt for MCUs allows a fast, iterative way to develop Qt applications – with the front end defined in declarative QML, and with business logic implemented in C/C++. The result is a fluid, graphical UI that greatly enhances applications running on microcontrollers.
“Customers across industries are demanding powerful, highly intuitive applications, such as those they already enjoy on their smartphones, but scaled down to lower-end hardware,” said Petteri Holländer, SVP of Product Management, The Qt Company. “With the introduction of Qt for MCUs, they can use Qt for virtually any software project they’re working on, regardless of the target device – with the added convenience of using just one technology framework and toolset. Our vision is to give customers across industries the platforms and toolkits they need to build powerful, smart, user-friendly applications – without being constrained by the types of target devices they can support.”
“What’s more, customers are no longer forced to update their legacy applications by taking months to rewrite the code base for those applications,” he said. “They can use Qt to modernize and customize them in a fraction of the time.”
Resources
Qt Quick Ultralite is now available to download, evaluate and purchase. For additional information, visit www.qt.io/qt-for-mcus. For more details:
- Read the release blog post
About The Qt Company
Qt Group (Nasdaq Helsinki: QTCOM) is a global software company with a strong presence in more than 70 industries and is the leading independent technology behind millions of devices and applications. Qt is used by major global companies and developers worldwide, and the technology enables its customers to deliver exceptional user experiences and advance their digital transformation initiatives. The company's net sales in year 2018 totaled 45,6 MEUR and it employs some 300 people. To learn more, visit http://qt.io.
