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In the autumn of 2024, Qt Group organized, Qt;Athon, a online coding competition for university students around the world, together with Spyrosoft and Scythe Studio. 100 student teams from 23 countries participated in Qt;Athon, which was held in two rounds. In the first round, participants had 24 hours for three small coding challenges. The 10 best teams and students advanced to the second round, where they were given a challenge to create applications based on the project briefs from the competition partners: 'Qt Communicator' by Spyrosoft and 'Qt Factory' by Scythe Studio. Scythe Studio and Spyrosoft participated in the competition judging and they also respectively picked their favorites.
Qt;Athon 2024 Winners: Team ‘Gators’ from University of Florida, United States
Team ‘Gators’, aka Cayden Keene and Colin McClure, students at University of Florida, won Qt;Athon 2024 with their Human-Machine Interface for a simulated bottling factory. They developed a Qt Quick desktop application that receives data from the server and displays it in real-time for operators to monitor. The project focused on simulating factory sensors and transmitting their data to a server using MQTT. Additionally, they implemented various features, including error notifications when sensor values fall outside acceptable ranges.
Colin describes the project:
“We utilized modern technologies such as Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, the Bun runtime, the Drizzle ORM, and Traefik to deliver a scalable, fault-tolerant data processing system (which we call the Data Processing Unit, or DPU) that communicates via WebSockets to our Qt Quick application to deliver real-time data across multiple sensors integrated in multiple machines as well as warnings and alarms on such data. This sensor data was simulated using an ESP32 microcontroller, which sent payloads through the MQTT broker to the DPU, authorizing via TLS certificates.”
In fact, simulating real-world conditions was something that Cayden was most proud of in the final work:
“What I'm most proud of in our project is how we integrated real hardware (ESP32 and a cloud hosted server) to make our simulation as close to real-world conditions as possible.”
Both Cayden, a Computer Science major, and Colin, a Computer Engineering major, had some experience with Qt, and they participated in Qt;Athon to further develop their Qt skills and deepen their knowledge of the framework. They enjoyed developing with Qt, as Colin describes:
“Qt’s technologies made it easy to both connect to a WebSocket server and process JSON payloads on the C++ backend. Of course, the QML frontend made it easy to interface with the C++ backend, giving us the effective connection to the DPU using Qt’s idiomatic libraries.”
In the future, both hope to work with software. Cayden mentions that he would like to work with Qt:
“Looking ahead, I would love to pursue a career working with Qt, as I really enjoy creating intuitive user interfaces for hardware systems.”
Colin hopes to work with designing and implementing solutions for SCADA systems, like their winning application or to focus on Industrial IoT, as he describes:
“Being able to couple my background in designing backend systems with the challenges of a fast-paced environment, such as that of I-IoT, sounds like a dream come true to me.”
Scythe Studio picked Gator's application as their pick for the best work. You can meet our Qt;Athon 2024 winners, Cayden and Colin, at the Qt World Summit, where they will showcase their winning project.
💡 Check out the project on GitHub.
Team Gators won tickets, flights, and accommodation to the Qt World Summit 2025, that is to be held on May 6th and 7th in Munich, Germany. There they will showcase their winning project to a network of Qt Developers and companies looking for talent.
Qt;Athon 2024 Second Place: Team ‘Twenty-One’ from FH Technikum Wien, Austria
Team ‘Twenty-One’, Mehmet Mert, Florian Mimmler, and Michael Klys came in second place in Qt;Athon 2024. The computer science students at FH Technikum Wien decided to participate in Qt;Athon to challenge themselves. Prior to Qt;Athon, they had worked once with the Qt framework as part of a semester project.
In their Qt;Athon project, they made a chat application named ‘QChatron’. They implemented features like direct messaging between two users, group chats for multiple users, and sub-channels for special topics within the channel. The team describes the project:
“Having some experience with server-client applications, we wanted to build on that and explore the "Qt way" of client-server development. The server uses QSslSockets for secure, encrypted communication and connects to an SQLite database to manage users, messages, channels, and threads. The front-end, developed with QML, allowed us to create a dynamic and modern UI.”
The team mentioned that the project was fun to do and also an amazing opportunity to improve their skills. Mehmet, the team lead, describes working with Qt:
In the beginning, many of Qt's features were unfamiliar and somewhat challenging. However, as we delved deeper into the project, we started to understand how everything worked. The more we worked, the more we learnt and slowly every feature started to make more sense. It was an interesting experience, and the project turned out quite well.
Team Twenty-One's application was the Spyrosoft pick as the best work related to their project brief.
💡 Check out the project on GitHub
Qt;Athon 2024 Third Place: Team Yeagerists from Government College of Technology, Coimbatore, India
In third place comes team ‘Yeagerists’, Jaswin Kumar N R and Thamaraimanalan M who study at the Government College of Technology, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India. Thamaraimanalan M is majoring in Electronics and Communication Engineering, and Jaswin Kumar N R in Computer science and Engineering.
Before participating in Qt;Athon, they had explored PyQt, a Python binding for Qt, to make desktop applications. They had also learnt about Qt from desktop environments like KDE and other various Linux applications. All of this inspired them to participate in Qt;Athon. Their Qt;Athon project was a Qt Communicator - A Chatting Application made with Qt QML, Firebase and Javascript. The front-end was designed entirely with QML. For authentication, they used Firebase with its REST API. The team lead, Jaswin Kumar N R, describes the projects work like so:
“While developing the app, we noticed that Firebase has a C++ SDK, but it was rather difficult for us to integrate it with our QML application due to our inexperience working with C++ libraries. Instead, we decided to leverage the REST API. In doing so, we accomplished two things, firstly, a low executable size due to not having to add an extra library to work with Firebase, and secondly, a simple and efficient way to make a full-fledged application which can be used by anyone instantly just by downloading the standalone application. There is no need to separately install extra dependencies, since the application is made of the bare minimum.”
They aim to further develop their competition application into a more robust experience.
The Future of Qt's University and Talent Network
Qt;Athon was organized as part of our University and Talent Network, launched in June 2024. The network's goal is to inspire and foster the next generation of Qt developers, designers, quality engineers and beyond. Qt;Athon received quite a lot of positive feedback from the students. Many of the finalists mentioned how it was a exciting and practical learning experience for them. Besides Qt;Athon, there have been many great collaborations with various universities as part of the university and talent network. We hope to bring you more chances to participate and hear about these initiatives in the near future.
