Since the mission of the Raspberry Pi foundation is to "put the power of digital making into the hands of people all over the world" there is no shortage of options for programming the Pi. We have at our disposal many choices in programming languages, each with multiple application frameworks, and a large community of Raspberry Pi users for support.

QtLogoFeeling overwhelmed with options, I chose the one that best lines up with my long-term goal of getting up and running on ROS. The ROS plug-in architecture for operator GUI is rqt, based on Qt. And like much of ROS, the user has the option of working with rqt in either C++ or Python. Since I had started dabbling with ROS in Python before getting distracted, I thought the combination of Qt and Python would be a good direction to go.Python Logo

The Qt framework itself is aimed at C++ developers, and its documentation is written accordingly. Fortunately there are translation layers (language bindings) for Python. The one that seems to be the most mature is PyQt with a long list of resources, books, and online tutorials.

The next decision to make is which version to start learning. Browsing through the resources, it looks like Qt 4 is the mainstream version and Qt 5 is the new shiny. Since ROS is still in the midst of transitioning from Python 2 to Python 3, I assume rqt would be relatively old school as well. No matter which one I choose, there'll be differences I have to tackle whenever I get around to diving deep into ROS. On the assumption that the latest and greatest versions are also the most polished (an assumption based on how Python 3 cleaned up a lot of architectural messiness of Python 2) I thought I'd start learning with the latest releases and make adjustments later as I need to.

So: Qt 5 and Python 3 it is, with the help of PyQt5 binding. Which is easily installed on a Raspbian Stretch system by installing the packages "pyqt5-dev" and "pyqt5-dev-tools".