Qt Group teams with Qualcomm to streamline industrial IoT UI

Qt Group has announced a collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies to streamline the development of advanced graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and software quality assurance for industrial internet of things (IoT) so that IoT device manufacturers can significantly accelerate their products’ time to market.

Qt offers tools for designing, developing and assuring the quality of products, streamlining workflows by letting developers and designers work simultaneously in the same framework. The tools are said to be “ideal” for cross-platform development, particularly for low-powered and embedded devices.

The firm said that by using the enhanced development tools and framework, IoT manufacturers can apply advanced 3D graphics capabilities to their device’s UI, except in a much leaner package. It noted that other frameworks, such as game engines, also cater to high-fidelity graphics, but these normally include features that are not necessary for creating GUIs on IoT devices. Since the framework instead tailors its features to these IoT devices, Qt insists developers can build and run the UIs on far lower hardware requirements.

Qualcomm has long provided processors for devices in industries spanning smartphones, automobiles, extended reality and IoT. Qt Group believes porting its platform on Qualcomm software significantly streamlines how software suppliers develop and test UI offerings with advanced processors. It’s also said to increase the ease and speed with which hardware suppliers can, at scale, develop systems on modules, tiny computer systems with ready-made components that can be used to create embedded electronic devices, from robots to security cameras.

“When you tune out the noise surrounding tech innovation today, what is it that really impacts end users the most? It’s the user experience – specifically the user interface,” says Roger Mazzella, senior product manager at Qt Group.

“At Qt Group, our team has been proud to collaborate with Qualcomm Technologies in the automotive industry over the years. Now, we get to expand the benefits of all that groundwork to the IoT market, to which Qualcomm Technologies is well suited. Their high-powered processors handle data-heavy communication while providing ultra-fast performance that developers and end users expect.”

Juhapekka Niemi, senior vice-president at Qt Group, said: “The benefit of Qt’s technologies is that they already have a history of implementation across 70 industries. We will give hardware and software vendors for IoT the UI/UX development and QA tools they need right out of the box. Since these vendors don’t have to perform any integrations themselves, the ease of developing GUIs significantly cuts down the time it takes to launch their products.”

In addition to the extended UI capabilities, OEMs accessing Qualcomm Technologies’ processors that support Qt can now access Qt Group’s software development and quality assurance tools, designed to lower production barriers for manufacturers.

“At Qualcomm Technologies, we strongly believe in building an industry ecosystem that allows manufacturers to create excellent hardware and software solutions for vertical markets using our chipsets,” said Manvinder Singh, vice-president of strategy and partner solutions development of IoT at Qualcomm Technologies. “This collaboration gives developers a ready-made solution to build their creative solutions on top of.”