In this video, Alexandru Bordei and Hannes Winkler introduce the concept of Flutter remote displays for microcontrollers. They show a Flutter Android app rendering a smartwatch UI and streaming it via Bluetooth to an ESP32-based smartwatch, enabling interactive displays on low-cost devices by using Bluetooth for efficient frame transfer and touch event handling.
Links:
Go to https://pub.dev/ and search for flutter remote-display
https://github.com/KDABLabs/flutter-remote-display
https://github.com/ardera
https://github.com/ardera/flutter-pi
About the presenters:
– Alexandru Bordei is a full-stack developer with a decade of experience in creating custom solutions for web, API, and mobile development. His expertise and dedication have earned him recognition as a respected authority within the technology industry. He is currently the organizer of the Flutter Bucharest Meetup and was previously involved in organizing the Flutter Romania Meetup.
– Hannes is a bachelor student of computer science at Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg and works at KDAB as a software engineer. He’s the author of Flutter-pi, which is a tool to make Flutter run on embedded devices, and contributor to the Flutter SDK and engine.
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About KDAB:
KDAB Group has 100+ employees across Americas, Europe and Asia. The main offices are in Germany, France, the UK, Binghamton, NY (USA), Houston, TX (USA), and Sweden
https://kdab.group/contact/
[MUSIC PLAYING] [INAUDIBLE] So welcome. My name is Alex Bordei, and I was so excited to be here. This is the last day of FlutterCon, but look what I did with this guy here, Hannes, my friend. So he’s the inventor of Flutter-pi, you know, Flutter-pi, which is like a revolutionary thing. I’m going to show you how to set up Flutter-Pi on a Raspberry-pi. And we had this idea of how to create actually remote displays for chip microcontrollers like ESP32, Arduino, Pi-Pico, and a lot of other chip microcontrollers that are not actually able to keep Flutter alive. You know, Flutter is actually a big framework. We came with this idea of Flutter remote displays, and you can take a look here. So what you see here is a case study in which here we have an ESP32 microcontroller, and here we have an Android app. And what Hannes did here is connecting the smartwatch with the phone, and this screen here, this widget screen, is actually streamed real time on the smartwatch. Also the events, like if we click something here, you can see on the smartwatch real time. And also if we click something on the smartwatch, you can see the interaction real time on the Android device. Very powerful use case for products that shouldn’t be having so expensive microcontrollers to provide a screen, like I don’t know, any public service scooter or public bike, then you can connect with your phone to that particular vehicle, and the phone can stream directly the interface on the device without actually having the microprocessors and everything that is more expensive than a ESP32. Man, would you like to explain more about the way that was developed? Yeah, sure. So as Alex already said, the frames that are captured here from this widget are remote, transferred via Bluetooth Classic to this device. They are compressed a bit. We just do damage detection, so if only part of the screen changes, we only transfer the actual part that changed. Some other compression, one link encoding we use. And then we do some hacking to make the touch events work. That’s hacking to get it working, but now it works actually pretty well. This new package will be launched today at FlutterCon in a few hours. You can follow Pub.dev marketplace for KDABLab/flutter remote-display and you can play with it on your own. So this guy actually is a brain, so follow him, on GitHub.com/ardera [MUSIC PLAYING] Thank you. Thanks. [JINGLE MUSIC PLAYING]
1 Comment
This is gorgeous innovation! Congratulation, Hannes for such an accomplishment!