QT5 Smart Home demo on Colibri iMX7s

Technical Support
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Hi,
I have just build angstrom-qt5-x11-image version 2.7b5 and there is some QT smart home demo application running after boot. But this application is very slow. When I click by mouse to some button it take 10 seconds to have reaction.

Now I am worried that I was choose wrong CPU for my future project.

I want to create my own application using QT5. It will be just couple of simple buttons and 800x480 GIF animation as background. This should be replacment of our 10 years old design with LPC2478. This old CPU can do this.

Don you guys think the iMX7s is fast enough to run my future application as I describled?

Why is this demo application so slow? It is normal or I have something wrong in configuration?

Original LXDE image works just fine. Windows on desktop are moving smooth.

And I have another question about adding QT5 layer. I read that I have to add PACKAGECONFIG_FONTS_append_pn-qtbase = " fontconfig" into local.conf file. Otherwise there will be no fonts in system. I did not do that and fonts in QT demo application works. Do I really have to add this line into local.conf?

2

The i.MX 7 SoC used on Colibri iMX7 do not have a GPU. The Qt Smart Home demo however tries to show off Qt’s UI capabilities by using lots of features which do require GPU acceleration. The angstrom-qt5-x11-image does use software rendering to emulate OpenGL, which is just slow.

For simpler UI the Colibri iMX7S is fast enough. Just make sure to either use the Qt 2D renderer (which is available by default when using Qt for Device Creation or Boot2Qt). Or use Qt5 with Qt Widgets only.

As far as I know fontconfig is only needed if you use extra fonts. If your application works without and looks good, you should be fine.