Flutter Embedded: Raspberry Pi and a Touchscreen - How to Run Your Flutter App

[@cncm-official]

Very nice

[@btaylorflutterdart]

Thanks

[@daumienebi]

How is your app running on the PI?, I am planning on purchasing one and connecting a touch screen for a home project.

[@btaylorflutterdart]

Hi, yes, the Flutter/Dart app running as a Linux Desktop app. VS Code is the IDE for development. For your development system, it must be a Raspberry Pi Model 4B with 8G of RAM. I recommend an SSD drive instead of the SD card. For a touchscreen system, I am running the released version of the Flutter app on a Raspberry Pi model 4 B with 4G of RAM. The target must run Raspberry Pi for Desktop OS and have Flutter installed, as I outline in my tutorials. In one of my tutorials, I outline how to automatically start the Flutter app on boot. The dart_periphery package used to access the GPIO, I2C, UART, and PWM works but is limited on the number of I2C device part numbers they support with preconfigured classes. Let me know if you have any more questions. I am currently working on a series of Udemy courses covering these topics in more detail.

[@daumienebi]

​​@@btaylorflutterdart Thanks a lot for the insight. Is it compulsory to develop the app on a Raspberry PI?. I am planning on purchasing the 4GB model to run the final app but I plan on developing the app on my desktop Pc then ship the code to the PI for it to be executed later on (I believe I might have to build the release version for linux on a linux device). And what do you mean by Desktop OS? Do you mean the official Raspberry PI OS or something like Ubuntu?. I'll take a good look into your tutorial on how to automatically boot the app once the device is turned on. Do you think a Raspberry PI 3 can smoothly run a flutter app?. Thanks for your time!

[@btaylorflutterdart]

@@daumienebi Hi, yes you must build the release version on the system processor that is the same as your target. You cannot build an ARM processor app (Raspberry Pi) on any system that does not have the same ARM processor that is the same type. On my Mac, I can build iOS, Android and Web apps but not Windows or Linux for ARM. Not sure about Windows but I assume that you will have the same limitation. For a test, build a simple app and install the dart_periphery package, run a GPIO example, and see if it builds and let me know. I know that trying to build the Raspberry Pi app will not work using a Ubuntu Linux PC or a Mac (I have tried that). Mac will not even allow the dart_periphery package to load - immediate errors. On a Linux PC running Ubuntu it tries to build but crashes due to the different processor types.

[@marco_di]

Awesome 🤩

[@btaylorflutterdart]

I am working towards a full IoT system using Flutter-Dart on the Raspberry Pi Model 4 B. Next few videos will be more GPIO and then I2C.

[@marco_di]

@@btaylorflutterdart I'm looking forward to it. I think your videos are really good so far. I just started learning app development 4 years ago and there is still so much that I would like to learn and what I am missing.