An easy way to build PocketBook apps with Qt Quick and QML

[fstanis]

Hey all, I've been experimenting with homebrew apps for my PocketBook and after getting the idea to use Qt from this thread, I explored the device tree a bit and found the latest firmware ships with Qt 6.8.2 and that the QML of many built-in apps is also available. It seems PocketBook created their own QPA plugin named "pocketbook2", presumably adding some device optimizations which is used by default.

After some wrangling with CMake, I managed to build an app that dynamically links Qt and I made a "kitchen sink" app to play around with them (attached screenshot).

Because the latest firmware was built with a fairly recent toolchain (clang 15.0.3 and Buildroot 2024.05.1), I found that it's not necessary to use PocketBook's SDK - clang that comes with Debian Trixie works fine and C++20 features work too, which makes app development significantly easier. The only two files needed from the SDK are inkview.h and hwconfig.h.

I packaged everything in this GitHub repo I just created alongside my "kitchen sink" example. I only tested this on my InkPad Color 3 - I'm fairly confident it'll work on other devices, but would appreciate it if you could share your results.