DESK-MX6-L-TN-0001: Running Flutter on AXEL Lite

Info Box Applies to AXEL Lite Technical Notes Applies to SBC Axel Technical Notes

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

History

Version	Date	Development Kit version
4.0.1	May 2024	DESK-MX6-L 4.0.1

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 AXEL Lite 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-devel target from the desk-mx6-l-4.0.1 Yocto BSP tag (on desk-mx6-l-4.0.1 branch).

For SBC AXEL the meta-desk-mx Yocto layer sets then the following configuration:

MACHINE ??= "desk-mx6"
DISTRO ??= "fsl-imx-wayland"

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

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

• enter the build directory and properly modify the conf/bblayers.conf file

echo 'BBLAYERS += " ${BSPDIR}/sources/meta-flutter "' >> conf/bblayers.conf
echo 'BBLAYERS += " ${BSPDIR}/sources/meta-flutter/meta-flutter-apps "' >> conf/bblayers.conf

• modify the conf/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-devel image

Running Flutter in the target

Once the library PATH has been properly set:

root@desk-mx6:~# 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-mx6:~# flutter-client -f -b /usr/share/flutter/flutter-gallery/3.19.3/release/

flutter-gallery demo on SBC AXEL