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Comment by dave78 | Hacker News Reader

There was recently a flareup on HN about PlatformIO trying to make money by charging a fee to vendors to be supported (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36090536). Maybe Arduino wants in on that.

I honestly don't see how such strategies work long-term though. As a former embedded SW engineer, the Arduino IDE seems very toy-like - which is excellent for people just starting out, but not something a company developing an embedded product is likely to use. I think PlatformIO is similar but I have only tried that once.

If these companies try to get vendors to pay them to support their boards, or try to start charging users directly, I really think that the hobby community will move on and someone will fork or create their own solution, and the whole cycle will start again.

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What is the difference between PlatformIO and something you use to develop for an Embedded platform? To me it seems PlatformIO is just a wrapper around the same command-line tools used by other companies.

It gives a consistent CLI, which can be wrapped easily by e.g. VScode. It also gives a reasonable cross platform config and library management.

Installing toolchains on Windows is a huge pain, and installing the a consistent version of toolchains across platforms is also hard.

Platformio is a package manager for embedded systems

> just a wrapper

That phrase encompasses a huge amount of value. VS Code+PlatformIO is free but I would happily pay for it. I was already paying for an Arduino Visual Studio plugin (Visual Micros) before I learned about it.

It is an easiest way to install and configure all required toolchains on a random computers.

I've used to maintain my own set of Makefiles for AVR, and that was mostly OK because avr-gcc is in ubuntu repos, and all my computers are Ubuntu anyway.

But when I switched to ESP8266, this no longer worked, there are no nice debs with SDKs I could find. I could have created a complex set of Makefiles to download SDKs, compilers and tools.. but I switched to platformio instead to do it all for me.

This turned out to be a great idea when I later wanted to try STM8 and RP2040 - just 2 line change in ini file and you have a fully working toolchain, libraries, etc.. And the ability to easily share the programs with others and to know that they can use them even if they don't run Ubuntu is great too.

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