I used the on-board video connector for the bulk of my development until my touch screen arrived.
It will not support an adapter.
You have to have a true HDMI cable and a monitor that has a true HDMI connector. No fake-it-until-you-make-it is possible with that connector. Well, I suspect it is the driver that doesn’t provide enough oomph to power the adapter.
Yes, I was able to use that port. It was all I had until the adapter/card came in for the touch screen. I had to use an old Acer a279h monitor because it was the only one I had with such a port.
Download EasyInstaller. Flash it to SD. Put the board in reset mode and boot. Easy installer should find and use the monitor.
I personally never did anything to make that port work but I wasn’t the first to have my board. I vaguely remembering something in the documentation about a jumper or dip switch that might be required, but I think that was for the adapter card and touch screen.
I will try putting EasyInstaller on SD card, and booting in recovery mode.
I was using VNC with the factory installed EasyInstaller, but after loading boot2qt image I lost vnc server. I am not seeing any output on the built-in HDMI output X37 with boot2qt image. I will try to install TorizonCore. I should try another HDMI display.
Not what I’m saying. I’m saying you cannot use things like this:
Nor can you use things like this
It must be a true HDMI cable
and your monitor must natively support HDMI.
That boot2qt stuff is pretty bad. Download the official Torizon EasyInstaller and install TorizonCore. Unless something is horribly hosed on your carrier board, TorizonCore will load the proper device tree for this carrier board and use the built in video port.
You will need to have a USB keyboard and mouse.
I bought one of these powered USB hubs and it worked with the board.
Actually, this is not possible. The Verdin iMX8M Mini processor doesn’t have an HDMI interface (the processor itself). That’s why you will need the converter. As you can see in the Verdin iMX8M Mini datasheet (5.6 section):
5.6 Display
The i.MX 8M Mini SoC features a single display controller with MIPI DSI output with up to four
lanes. The i.MX 8M Mini SoC does not have a native LVDS function. However, it is possible to add an MIPI
DSI to LVDS (or other display interfaces) bridge on the carrier board. The MIPI DSI port is available as a
"Reserved" interface of the Verdin standard. The HDMI port in the "Reserved" class of the Verdin is not
available on the Verdin iMX8M Mini.
I apologize for what happened to you, there was a mistake with the adapter. Please, contact the Toradex Sales team again so they can replace it for you if the new adapter.
As you can see in the revision history, the connector was replaced (as you correctly mentioned):
- Replaced Main Board-to-Board Connector: Samtec QTH-030-02-L-D-A with Samtec LSS-130-03-L-DV-A-K-TR
Just to mention, using the last Toradex Easy Installer Release build 5.7.0, you can access Toradex Easy Installer by VNC viewer, so there is no need for a keyboard plugged into the board anymore (just to flash the image in this case).
I’ve written multiple books on Qt. I never recommend Qt for new development given all of the licensing shenanigans that has happened over the past couple of years. There really isn’t an OpenSource version anymore. Definitely no LTS OpenSource. Other than legacy products still needing maintenance, the medical device world has abandoned Qt entirely. Ford didn’t abandon it, relying on it for infotainment systems in their cars. Now they no longer make cars and last I hear will be laying off thousands.
May don’t like it, but wxWidgets is just as big an 800 pound gorilla of a library.
If you are running inside of Docker containers you can run almost any X11 library. There are limitations, particularly in the GLES area. If you just need minimal and can deal with a library that isn’t fully polished NanoGUI is a good choice. I’ve used that on this board before. Elements is a more robust choice.
I have used Qt for many years, mainly widgets, targeting RHEL, Android, iOS, macOS, Windows. More recently I was involved with a Qt for Device Creation product that used QML.
That is interesting that medical industry and automotive, except for Ford, have largely abandoned Qt. Automotive and medical applications. They are using the graphics libs you mentioned? Crank Storyboard? Any feedback on LVGL ?https://lvgl.io/
In my experience QML resulted in a nice responsive UI on an embedded Linux device running on an Toradex iMX6UL SOM. No OpenGL used.
We have a new UX design in FIGMA we were hoping to import FIGMA design into QML. However, this requires an added expensive license for “Qt for Enterprise” on top of “Qt for Device Creation” costs.
A containerized app for embedded Linux either Docker or similar makes a lot of sense. I will look into NanoGui and especially Elements sound interesting. Robust is good.
Is there a way to install VNC on the boot2qt image installed from EasyInstaller. VNC worked great with the EasyInstaller. Once I installed the boot2qt image using EasyInstaller, I lost VNC support.
Do you know if the “TorizonCore with evaluation containers” images contain support for VNC?
I understand the native HDMI port on carrier board ( X37 ) will not work with an Verdin iMX8MM. The Toradex Sales Team shipped a replacement yesterday.
VNC support is installed inside Toradex Easy Installer only. There is no support for it inside TorizonCore.
It’s possible to add VNC support for your custom image using Yocto. You can add a recipe to install the VNC inside of it. If you want to try it, you can follow the recipes from Toradex Easy Installer as an example: meta-toradex-tezi/recipes-graphics/neatvnc at dunfell-5.x.y · toradex/meta-toradex-tezi · GitHub. I don’t think it will be an easy thing to do if you are not used to Yocto though.
Great! Feel free to ask any further questions that you might have.
I had used yocto with previous Toradex iMX6UL SOM project. I was hoping TorizonCore might save work this time. However, I expect there is no escaping Yocto, and I should start setup to get Yocto building sooner rather than later.
Thank you @hfranco.tx ! I wanted to figure out Docker on TorizonCore anyway.
Any tips for a headless method ( I have no display currently ), of replacing an installed boot2qt image with TorizonCore ?
I am working on setting up TFTP, NFS, boot. I wanted to get this working regardless. I can memory dump a TFTP server file loaded into RAM from uboot prompt. Next I am working on NFS and getting an image to boot.
To enable the VNC in TorizonCore, you just need to pass --env ENABLE_VNC=1 to the Weston container or to the docker compose file. This will initialize Weston with VNC enabled for you.
Forgot to answer this part.
They don’t currently have an ARM port and they definitely got rid of all that icky nasty QML, but a port of Qt 4.8 with major changes is available as a true OpenSource project.