Creating multi-process UIs is a requirement for a broad range of systems across many industries, and there are a variety of use cases available. Everything from fully leveraging your hardware in a digital automotive cockpit — unifying the user experience across all screens on a single SoC, through to separating out critical safety features in medical devices and ensuring safe third-party updates for set-top boxes and digital TVs. Qt Wayland helps you create multi-process user interfaces which support complex architectures.

Recently, we have put a lot of effort into Qt Wayland and the purpose of this blog is to provide a summary of all the content pieces that have been created in recent times. We hope this may entice your interest to add a window compositing system in your next project.

Multi-screen demo for Automotive

At Embedded World 2017 one of our showcases was a multi-screen demo featuring a digital instrument cluster and infotainment system (IVI). To create the multi-process architecture, it uses the application manager based on Qt Wayland in the Qt Automotive Suite. This demo gives you a good idea of how a system with multiple UI processes can look.

[embed]https://youtu.be/JAsxxeHCUSE[/embed]

Qt Wayland for Agriculture with CLAAS E-Systems

CLAAS E-Systems, part of the CLAAS Group, which is one of the leading manufacturers of harvesters and tractors, quickly adopted Qt Wayland. We have been in contact with Andreas Cord-Landwehr from CLAAS, who stressed that the complexity for automotive was nothing compared to the complexity that he experiences within the field of agriculture. He was more than willing to write a blog to tell his story of how Qt Wayland allowed them to improve their UIs and UX for their machinery. Read the blog to learn more about his experiences with Qt Wayland.

Creating devices with multiple UI processes using Wayland

One of our main developers for Qt Wayland, Johan Helsing, wrote a blog post in conjunction with our release of the Qt Wayland Compositor API in 5.8, where he explained some of the benefits of creating multi-process user interfaces, as well as why and how it can support your project. He also created a video tutorial on how to create a compositor. Read the blog and watch the tutorial and also check out his on-demand webinar — Creating Devices with multiple UI processes.

Qt from git on the Tinkerboard (with Wayland)

Laszlo Agocs, one of our senior software engineers, conducted a test using an Asus Tinkerboard and set up the latest Qt base and qtdeclarative from the dev branch and tested out Qt Wayland for window compositing. Read more about the project and the results.

There are also more blog posts on this topic available. Contact us if you need support or consulting on how to get started.