It’s difficult to estimate and I don’t know enough about that applications requirements either, but to give some kind of indication, two years ago I wrote a tool to control an LED (neopixel) strip, or, rather, to create an animation that would be played back on the neopixels. The animation was a json file containing a timeline of events and parameters (think “at time t fade pixels 2 through 10 from rgb x to rgb y over 5 seconds). You could have four parallel timelines that got blended together.
I wrote a GUI editing tool using QML that had three main UI elements: a visualisation of the LEDs, a properties widget and a timeline. It also had start, stop, rewind buttons so you could play the animation back on the visualisation panel. The visualisation panel was also interactive to select individual leds. The timeline had time labels at the top which you could click to select a time and four “swimlanes” where you could draw the effects on, which controlled start time and duration (the rest of the parameters could then be set in the properties window, for the selected effect).
The led visualisation and timeline components were custom made (I don’t remember if they were made using custom QSceneNodes, QOainter or composed out of nested QML elements). The end result wasn’t particularly pretty, but I was going for functionality over look and the audience was limited to myself and one other person. The entire application (including the code to actually drive the leds, which ran on a raspberry pi, but shared code with the GUI tool to make the playback in the UI as realistic as possible) took 3 to 4 days. I’m sure given a few weeks I could have made it look really slick and given a few months could have made the UX something I would be happy to have other users use.
So I don’t know how long your application would take me, especially if it has to look identical to what you have, but I have been quite productive in QML, even when custom components were needed.
I’m not trying to say it would have been a better choice for you, though, just that I often find Qt and QML being under appreciated and underrated.
Although the Qt companies recent behaviour and aggressiveness in getting people to switch from open source to paid license had really put me off to the point where I’m not sure I’d use it for a new project, but those reasons are all not related to anything technical.
I wrote a GUI editing tool using QML that had three main UI elements: a visualisation of the LEDs, a properties widget and a timeline. It also had start, stop, rewind buttons so you could play the animation back on the visualisation panel. The visualisation panel was also interactive to select individual leds. The timeline had time labels at the top which you could click to select a time and four “swimlanes” where you could draw the effects on, which controlled start time and duration (the rest of the parameters could then be set in the properties window, for the selected effect).
The led visualisation and timeline components were custom made (I don’t remember if they were made using custom QSceneNodes, QOainter or composed out of nested QML elements). The end result wasn’t particularly pretty, but I was going for functionality over look and the audience was limited to myself and one other person. The entire application (including the code to actually drive the leds, which ran on a raspberry pi, but shared code with the GUI tool to make the playback in the UI as realistic as possible) took 3 to 4 days. I’m sure given a few weeks I could have made it look really slick and given a few months could have made the UX something I would be happy to have other users use.
So I don’t know how long your application would take me, especially if it has to look identical to what you have, but I have been quite productive in QML, even when custom components were needed.
I’m not trying to say it would have been a better choice for you, though, just that I often find Qt and QML being under appreciated and underrated.
Although the Qt companies recent behaviour and aggressiveness in getting people to switch from open source to paid license had really put me off to the point where I’m not sure I’d use it for a new project, but those reasons are all not related to anything technical.