Use of internet connection

PlatformIO IDE
1

Hi, I will use PIO occasionally on a windows NUC in my remote astronomical observatory. There is no mains electricity there, but there is mobile network signal which I use for the astro equipment.

I note that PIO needs an internet connection and at the observatory I will be using my mobile data for the connection, so I need to keep data use under control. Could anyone explain how PIO uses the connection and if for instance PIO decided to update itself, does that use a lot of data?
Is it possible to use PIO without an internet connection?
Perhaps there’s a way to minimise PIO data use on my remote machine?

thanks for help on this.

2

Add a firewall deny rule to pio.exe on your computer. If you don’t need to be downloading libraries or platforms or tools, then no internet connection should be needed. Only if it is really needed it will then at least show an error message and you can temporarily enable it.

You can minimize what PlatformIO does in the CLI:

>pio settings get
Name                          Current value [Default]                              Description
----------------------------  ---------------------------------------------------  ----------------------------------------------------------
auto_update_libraries         No                                                   Automatically update libraries (Yes/No)
auto_update_platforms         No                                                   Automatically update platforms (Yes/No)
check_libraries_interval      7                                                    Check for the library updates interval (days)
check_platformio_interval     3                                                    Check for the new PlatformIO interval (days)
check_platforms_interval      7                                                    Check for the platform updates interval (days)
check_prune_system_threshold  1024                                                 Check for pruning unnecessary data threshold (megabytes)
enable_cache                  Yes                                                  Enable caching for HTTP API requests
enable_telemetry              Yes                                                  Telemetry service <https://bit.ly/pio-telemetry> (Yes/No)
force_verbose                 No                                                   Force verbose output when processing environments
projects_dir                  C:\Users\<user>\Documents\PlatformIO\Projects  Default location for PlatformIO projects (PlatformIO Home)

So a generic countermeasure would be

pio settings set auto_update_libraries No
pio settings set auto_update_platforms No
pio settings set check_platformio_interval 9999
pio settings set enable_telemtry No
3

thanks for very helpful reply, sorry for late response, been without effective internet for a while.