Questions about ArduinoIDE BSPs and versioning

jongarrison · June 28, 2019, 5:54pm

Hi, I’m switching to PlatformIO from the Arduino IDE. I’m trying to understand how the versioned Board Support Packages (BSPs) in the ArduinoIDE relate to the similar project configuration concepts in PlatformIO: platform, board, framework. I am asking specifically because I need to be able to use the Adafruit nRF52 Feather BSP 0.9.3 (the latest is 0.11.0) and I’m not sure how to configure PlatformIO to use the equivalent of the older version.

Could somebody explain how the platformio.ini settings: platform, board and framework relate to the ArduinoIDE’s board support packages?

Supporting information

Platform IO’s docs for “Nordic nRF52840-DK (Adafruit BSP)” - Nordic nRF52840-DK (Adafruit BSP) — PlatformIO latest documentation
Adafruit’s BSP source code (see release tab for specific releases) - GitHub - adafruit/Adafruit_nRF52_Arduino: Adafruit code for the Nordic nRF52 BLE SoC on Arduino

Thanks for any advice!

maxgerhardt · June 28, 2019, 8:59pm

After reading this, this, this, this and this, I can tell you

you can read the used BSP version from the macro ARDUINO_BSP_VERSION, just Serial.println("Used BSP: " + ARDUINO_BSP_VERSION);
it reads the BSP version it from the framework’s version=(\d+\.\d+.\d+) line in the platform.txt
can be force-set to a specific version by just stating board_build.bsp.version = xyz in the platformio.ini, but it won’t actually changed the used version it seems
as can be seen from the package manifest, two releases of framework-arduinoadafruitnrf52 exist
- 1.1001.190508 is BSP version 0.10.1
- 1.903.0 is BSP version 0.9.3
the used framework-arduinoadafruitnrf52 package version is determined by the platform’s platform.json. E.g. the most recent version says

github.com

platformio/platform-nordicnrf52/blob/develop/platform.json#L40-L44


      
          "version": ">=1.60301.0,<1.80000.0",
          "optionalVersions": [
            "~1.80201.0",
            "~1.90201.0"
          ]

So it will pull the BSP 0.10.1 version.

platform=nordicnrf52@3.2.0 has

github.com

platformio/platform-nordicnrf52/blob/9baa2cb95afb05a9f68e909c26ade050dba014dd/platform.json#L40-L44


      
          "framework-arduinoadafruitnrf52": {
            "type": "framework",
            "optional": true,
            "version": "~1.903.0"
          },

So it will use the BSP 0.9.3 version. (See here and switch through tags).

In short:

platform=nordicnrf52@X.Y.Z with X.Y.Z from Releases · platformio/platform-nordicnrf52 · GitHub gives you a different platform.json
platform.json contains which package versions to use (using semantic versioning)
package content download links can be obtained from the packageRepositories entries in the platform.json.
in case of the framework-arduinoadafruitnrf52 package, the BSP version is in the platform.txt as version=... string

jongarrison · June 28, 2019, 10:52pm

Wow, thank you for all that information!