PlatformIO in Atom wtih Python Anaconda

Attempting to use PlatformIO with Atom and Anaconda is pretty much the worst-case scenario, because

  1. Atom support has been deprectated in favor of VSCode. VSCode is the thing that gets you the intended PlatformIO experience. Atom hasn’t been updated for 3/4 of a year now.
  2. From my experience on the forum here, Anaconda takes control of the system’s Python environment in a not-so-nice way, leading to many conflicts with PlatformIO, such as overriding the default Python interpreter and internal Python libraries, e.g. as seen yesterday in I cannot debug with J-Link.

You may of course still attempt to get a successful installation. The first thing will to do will be to get the requirements installed, which means getting a decently recent Python version. I’m using a Python 3.8 installation, at least 3.6 is needed. You should probably install Python Release Python 3.8.10 | Python.org.

With that installed you can change the interpreter path to the Python 3.8 installation and, while praying Anaconda does not interfere, attempt PlatformIO installation with that.

Otherwise, try giving VSCode + PlatformIO a go.