WPE: Building full screen web applications for the Raspberry Pi
For those that didn’t read my previous blog post: WPE WebKit gives you a full screen browser with hardware acceleration on an ARM device like the Raspberry Pi.
After figuring out how to run WPE Webkit on a Raspberry Pi, it was time to take it to the next level and run a web application with some hardware accelerated features on it.
WPE Webkit isn’t available for Raspbian. You will need a build system like Yocto or Buildroot to get it running. The builds it produces contains the bare minimum to run your application. That is quite handy when you want to build a stable production image. However if you want to develop for WPE Webkit, you might run a little short on development tools.
So to make you feel comfortable in a Buildroot linux image, I’m going to show you how to include all the packages you need for development. I’ll make sure you can work with things like like bash, nano, screen, git, node.js, wifi, Bluetooth, serial port communication and so forth.
There will be a lot of “do this, do that” instructions, but it’s important that you understand what’s going on if you want to bake your own Buildroot images in the future. If you just want my prebuilt image to play with, you can get it here and start reading from “Running your image”.
