DESK-MP1-TN-0001: Running Flutter on SBC ETRA

Info Box Applies to ETRA Technical Notes Applies to ETRA SBC Technical Notes

This application note has been validated using the kit version in the History table.

History

Version	Date	Development Kit version
1.0.1	May 2024	DESK-MP1-L 1.0.1

Introduction

Flutter is an open source framework by Google for building beautiful, natively compiled, multi-platform applications from a single codebase. Its main powerful characteristic is to deploy to multiple devices from a single codebase: mobile, web, desktop, and embedded devices.

Flutter consists of both a UI language and a rendering engine. When a Flutter application is compiled, it ships with both the UI code and the rendering engine

This Technical Note (TN) describes how to create a complete SD card that can run on ETRA SBC a Flutter environment for running the Flutter demo applications.

Flutter github repository is the entry point for the source codes, while the Flutter documentation is available here.

Build steps

The starting point is the dave-image-qt5-weston target from the desk-mp1-l-1.0.1 Yocto BSP tag (on kirkstone branch).

For ETRA SBC the weston distro is used initializing the repo in the following way:

DISTRO=openstlinux-weston MACHINE=desk-mp1 source ./desk-setup-release.sh

• enter the sources directory and clone the meta-flutter repository

cd sources && git clone https://github.com/meta-flutter/meta-flutter.git -b kirkstone

• properly modify the bblayers.conf file

    ${OEROOT}/sources/meta-flutter \
    ${OEROOT}/sources/meta-flutter/meta-flutter-apps \

• modify the local.conf appending the flutter packages:

IMAGE_INSTALL:append = " flutter-samples-material-3-demo flutter-wayland-client packagegroup-flutter-gallery"

then it is possible to build the dave-image-qt5-weston image

Pre-built image

A pre-built image is available - for demo purposes - on our mirror server at the following link.

Running Flutter in the target

Once the library PATH has been properly set:

root@desk-mp1:~# export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/share/flutter/flutter-gallery/3.19.3/release/lib

it is possible to start a flutter demo example invoking the flutter-client:

root@desk-mp1:~# flutter-client -f -b /usr/share/flutter/flutter-gallery/3.19.3/release/

flutter-gallery demo on SBC ETRA