I’m looking to include PlatformIO pre-installed on our emonSD RaspberryPi pre-built SD card image.
In a standard install the .platformio the folder is over 100Mb, I see there are a lot of example code in here. Is is possible to have a platformio install with the minimal needed for compiling and uploading without all these code examples?
How about 110KB? 
platformio · PyPI
Don’t use GitHub repository. We have pre-built packages hosted on PyPi. I recommend using virtualenv (python-virtualenv apt-package)
mkdir ~/.platformio && cd ~/.platformio
virtualenv .penv
source .penv/bin/activate
pip install -U platformio
platformio --version
You will have 100% isolated environment. Now, platformio/pio binary is located in ~/.platformio/.penv/bin. You can add this folder to $PATH or symlink binary to /usr/local/bin.
2-nd solution is to use generic system’s Python Package Manager pip (python-pip apt package). In this case you need to run it with sudo
sudo pip install platformio