Business justification

Big part of The Qt Company (TQC) business is based on Distribution Licenses. Small scale hardware with low BoM typically means big volumes thus scaling down is important business driver for us. This space is also important for OSS developers and we need to find the right balance for attracting OSS developers in to low end hardware and using Qt, while maintaining compelling reason to buy. As low end hardware almost always also means custom hardware there is a significant service opportunity booth for TQC and for Qt partners in this space.

High level requirements

Hardware targets

• MCU targets, Qt with less than 2MB memory but limited to MCU's capable of running decent size color display. That usually means Cortex-M4 and up.
  • Ability to run parts of Qt on bare metal or on freeRTOS (with or without POSIX). We may also need to evaluate AliOS and few other popular MCU RTOS vendors as well as ARM offering for tools and OS side.
• ACPU targets with iMX6 ULL and alikes on Cortex-A and other CPU architectures running Embedded Linux, QNX or INTEGRITY.
• Headless use cases with basic connectivity
• Research impact and needs from combo MCU+ACPU board (QTPM-1681)

Developer workflow

• Full developer e2e workflow within Qt tools and framework (deploy, debug, profile etc) QTPM-1666
• Full designer e2e workflow (live preview, collaboration with developer etc) QDS-364
• Adaptation to capabilities (on both designer and developer) tooling versus target limitations and capabilities (e.g. when you configure a project with limited HW it will disable Qt features not available on that target automatically)

Qt compliancy and cross platform capabilities

The ultralight research approach (QML is a UI spec, no Javascript in QML, limited or missing Qt C++ libraries and API's) and learnings needs to be taken in to account in designing Qt 6. How much of that can and should be taken in to Qt 6 without jeopardizing key Qt values as cross platform framework?