I’ve got an old laptop and a newish quad core server running FreeBSD, with 16gb ram.
Is the a model or a way, that platformio could be used on my laptop and submit compile jobs to my server and return the binary / or perform the firmware upload remotely whilst returning the errors? Should be able to get platformio to run on my server.
Not a usual set up, maybe it’s undesirable. But thought it might be quite cool:) and speed things up for me until I get a faster computer!
Take a look at FAQ: Precompile Arduino code for Raspberry Pi.
You can use PlatformIO CLI on the server as “Cloud Compiler”.
P.S: We will provide a better solution for this task in PlatformIO 3.0.
That is great news. I’ll look into it… see if it offers much of a speed improvement! 
Thanks as always for the fast response!
Bit of a problem though… my server is freebsd. there is no toolchain for that.
Has anyone any idea if i might be able to obtain or compile toolchain-xtensa for Freebsd-amd64?
not done anything like that before… but it would be nice
looked hopeful, but its ubuntu, and windows… and i’ve never looked at a makefile…
guess i’ll have to use my ubuntu vm for now… thanks for the pointer though
done!
Thanks again for the help!
Got things compiling again after my hiatus! one more question for today if you don’t mind. is there a way around having to make an empty cpp file in src, if there is only an .ino file?
PlatformIO Build System doesn’t use .ino files. We convert them to valid .cpp. Here is the full list of supported extensions.
ok fair enough. I’m having some weird issues where the build process seems to be running twice.
Whenever I click the build icon, i get
[Wed May 18 15:49:03 2016] Processing esp12e (platform: espressif, board: esp12e, framework: arduino)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Wed May 18 15:49:03 2016] Processing esp12e (platform: espressif, board: esp12e, framework: arduino)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
followed by usually one of them failing. I also have to press build twice with alternate ones working.
The strange thing is that if i then click the lightening bolt on the side, for `build the current project’ is only does it once. my platformio.ini only has one board in it.
At the end i get it twice as well
scons: `.pioenvs/esp12e/firmware.bin' is up to date.
text data bss dec hex filename
340267 8588 30456 379311 5c9af .pioenvs/esp12e/firmware.elf
"xtensa-lx106-elf-size" -B -d .pioenvs/esp12e/firmware.elf
scons: `.pioenvs/esp12e/firmware.bin' is up to date.
text data bss dec hex filename
340267 8588 30456 379311 5c9af .pioenvs/esp12e/firmware.elf
========================= [SUCCESS] Took 6.81 seconds =========================
========================= [SUCCESS] Took 6.83 seconds =========================
is this normal
Any update on this? I’ve run in to the same problem.