Tips for Adding an Arduino-Compatible Board to PlatformIO

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1

Hello everyone and thanks for stopping by.

So, I have a Telit EVK – Charlie board. It’s an ATSAMD21G18A-based board. Since this MCU is already supported by PIO, I naively thought that flashing this board using PIO would be as simple as:

platform = atmelsam
board = samd21g18a

Unfortunately, even after tweaking the upload_protocol, I can’t successfully flash the board…

Given the fact that this board is already supported by the Arduino IDE, is there a little guide to help me make this board PIO compatible?

The Arduino IDE is really painful to use; I really enjoy using PIO.

Thanks for considering helping me.

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Adding support for a new Arduino core is showcased in a few PRs of the e.g. atmelsam platform (example 1, example 2). But without a good knowledge of PlatformIO instrinsics like package management, the platform script, the builder script, board definitions etc., it’s not exactly easy for newcomers to add support.

I’ve forked platform-atmelsam with added Telit Charlie support and created an example project: You would just need to clone it and open it in VSCode, no modifications needed.

It works by creating a new board definition, forking the Arduino core with the needed package.json here and adapting the builder script to use the same package versions as the Arduino core’s package_Telit-board_index.json dictates, as well as adapted build paths (e.g., cores/def). You can inspect the diff here

Let me know if it works and is uploadable to real hardware. Then, libraries like https://github.com/telit/arduino-me310-library should work out of the box, too.

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3

Amazing sir!

I can confirm the board is flashing nicely and goes blinky!

IMG_9954
IMG_99542816×2635 459 KB

Thank you for your time!
Is there any PR needed to hopefully get this board natively supported by the atmelsam platform?

4

I’ve filed a pull request here to request inclusion into mainline

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