Platform IO went full free

[Fire Doger]

Just got an email 
https://community.platformio.org/t/platformio-plus-goes-open-source-improving-embedded-development-community-worldwide/8240?utm_source=platformio&utm_medium=mail&utm_campaign=pio-plus-oss

[lollandster]

There goes my afternoon. I suddenly got a strong urge to learn platformIO.

We are very grateful to our partners for providing the funding to make this open source of PIO Plus tools possible. Our striving to stay independent from any specific vendor or platform is a guarantee that the vast list of supported hardware and software solutions will grow even more helping the future development of the PlatformIO ecosystem.

How is receiving money from a vendor the same as staying independent from any specific vendor?

[thm_w]

Old prices are here if anyone curious: https://web.archive.org/web/20170603204602/https://platformio.org/pricing

How is receiving money from a vendor the same as staying independent from any specific vendor?

They are just saying they will try to, whether or not that turns out to be true who knows. It clearly creates a conflict of interest on where the most effort should go.

[lollandster]

I can now confirm that debugging with platformIO works without having to log in anywhere. That's a win. It isn't completely plug'n'play, but it's close.

I did notice that debugging was much slower in vscode/Platformio than in STM32CubeIDE (Eclipse). From pressing the debug button to arriving at the first brake point took about twice as long in Platformio. I wonder how that scales, my demo project was just 50 lines of setting registers.

Stepping was sluggish. Single stepping in eclipse is faster than I can press the button and it feels fast. In Platformio it took about half a second from pressing the step button til stopping at the next line. Pressing as fast as I can 10 times on the step button in Platformio advances the program only 5 lines (doing the same in Eclipse moved 10 lines and felt instant).
PlatformIO shows the peripherals similar to STM32CubeIDE and Segger Ozone, but it doesn't highlight the changes like the other tools do.

I also wasn't able to find out how to change the optimization level in Platformio, but that is probably possible somehow. Most of the advanced stuff very well hidden and not well documented.

My test setup was a BluePill connected through J-Link. I used the CMSIS Cortex-M3 Device Peripheral Access Layer on both IDEs, but the STM32CubeIDE included a slightly newer version (4.2.0 vs 4.0.1). OS was fresh install of Windows 10 on a virtual machine. Both IDEs was fresh installs too.

[Fire Doger]

Other than sluggy I couldnn't find how to change the damn SWD speed, live watch was missing some very important (to me at least) features like setting how to display variables (dec, hex, bin, etc) which I like when every bit is a seperate flag for something.
You can't rearrange windows, no fancy breakpoint triger like on variable change, meh...

[lollandster]

Other than sluggy I couldnn't find how to change the damn SWD speed, live watch was missing some very important (to me at least) features like setting how to display variables (dec, hex, bin, etc) which I like when every bit is a seperate flag for something.
You can't rearrange windows, no fancy breakpoint triger like on variable change, meh...

I too noticed that you couldn't move the windows, but I though I saw them moved in one of the screenshots on platformio.org. Now looking at the screenshots again I see that I was mistaken.

It looks like changing the SWD speed is possible, but not easy: https://docs.platformio.org/en/latest/plus/debug-tools/custom.html#j-link-as-debugger-and-uploader

I assumed you could change the variable base-n in the live view since you can in the register view. My assumption was wrong.

I still can't get platformio to compile like I want to though. If I set "build_flags = -O0" in platformio.ini it builds as expected and the generated elf works in Ozone as I want it. But if I choose to debug in platformio, it defaults to "build_flags = -Og" and my empty delay loop is optimized out. Even setting "build_unflags = -Og" before "build_flags = -O0" does nothing.

[Fire Doger]

I was trying more than an hour with extra scripts but still nothing...
It definetly not for real work, I would recomend it only for arduino, looking peripheral registers, etc... But there is also Sloeber on eclipse...
In future it may become more usable but I doupt it will ever make it outside hobby usage...

[noweare]

I have been using  vsc/platformio for about a week now for arduino and stm32 development.  I should I say trying to figure out where things are for a week.  One of my problems is I don't know where VSC ends and platformio begins. Maybe it's me but documentation is hard to find. Mostly been looking on the Platformio site but maybe it's on the VSC site. It seems to like to flag errors and use squiggly lines. I really like the fact that you have one tool for all your boads and micros, that it runs on linux.

I think it is going to take some time getting used to it. Normally in a weeks time i am well familiar with nearly everything but it feels like I am just scratching the surface.
Finding out what commands & settings are available for controlling things would be a big plus.  What's all this json stuff anyways. What happend to good old fashioned text files ?