I am hoping to be able to make an F3F timer from a Pi. Someone already made software that seems to work perfectly. However, it is available in compiled form only for Windows. The source code is available on SF:
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The problem is, I am not able to figure out how to build this source for the Pi.
Does anyone have any hints or tips to help me in the right direction?
I would imagine you'd need to port the software to Unix. It uses Qt so that might not be impossible, but I suspect it'll be hard work, and quite possibly easier to write your own from scratch.
Yes, the developer actually states that his development platform is Linux.
The problem is that I have no idea what to do. I have done a little bit of programming in Windows, but with Linux, I am totally lost.
I have googled a bit, of course. The general tips I have found, state that there should be a "configure" and/or a "make" script. I can not find any of those in the files I have downloaded.
What I did was this:
On SF, I went to "Code":
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clicked "Trunk" and then "f3fTime_v004", which I expec is the latest version.
Then, I clicked "Download snapshot". That gives me a ZIP file which contains a bunch of files. There is one file named "f3fTime.pro" which looks sort of interesting, but I have no idea what to do with it. It does not seem like an executable script.
The .pro and .qrc files seem to be used by qmake to build a Linux version. I have no experience with this, the qt4-qmake package in Debian might do what you want.
OK, here's the standard procedure for compiling an unknown program on Linux (or indeed Unix).
Read any files named in capitals; INSTALL often has installation instructions.
Is there a file called "configure"? If so, run it ("./configure"). Resolve any errors, usually by installing libraries, though working out which ones you need can be hard work.
Is there a file called "Makefile"? If so, run it ("make"). Resolve any errors.
You should now have a working program. "make install" (for which you'll want to be root) will put it where the software author thought it should be.
There were some complications with the serial port library qextserialport. I was able to download the files and install some developer packages, and after that, I could make the program.
The program now starts and seems to work perfectly, except it does not detect any serial ports. Could it be because the pi's serial port is named somewhat untraditionally?
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