Tool to convert board from Arduino IDE boards.txt & variants folder to PlatformIO

Development Platforms
1

Hello. Is there a tool that would use the base information from the Arduino IDE boards.txt and board variant folder to create the .json file for PIO?

Looking to use a new board that is defined in the master branch of the arduino-esp32 core but not available under PIO.

Or, if anyone has the magic file for the seeed studio XIAO ESP32-S3 I’d be grateful.

There’s a bunch of stuff in a .json file that I’m not certain how to populate (new to PIO) and honestly I’d rather just get on with the project than trying to debug a .json file.

Auxiliary question: PIO copies the arduino-esp32 boards.txt file and all the folders in the variants folder to its .pio folder, but seems to then ignore that information. Is that correct? Confirming as I manually added the section from to Arduino-esp32 core boards.txt files as well as the variants folder for the XIAO ESP32-S3 to the relevant file & directories in the .pio folder but PIO did not pick it up when selecting a board for a new project.

Many thanks.

2

No, not that I’m aware of. Maybe the PIO team has something like that internally?

Just copy the closest ESP32S3 board and change the variant field, as long as pointing the framework at the newest git version so that variants/XIAO_ESP32S3 exist.