I’m building a strain gauge load cell kit that used a HX711 chip, and found publicly available code to interface with a HX711 in the form of a Platf

HX711 Library on Arduino Nano via PlatformIO

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2020-09-08 07:35:48

I’m building a strain gauge load cell kit that used a HX711 chip, and found publicly available code to interface with a HX711 in the form of a PlatformIO project. This motivated me to investigate PlatformIO. Installation was straightforward from with Visual Studio Code. I brought up the extensions marketplace, searched for PlatformIO, clicked install, and a few minutes later I was ready to go. This was a very promising start.

But while I’ve found PlatformIO to largely live up to its advertised ease of use, there were a few bumps climbing the learning curve. I typed in the simple Arduino introductory tutorial to blink the on board LED and hit Build All. That took almost half an hour as PlatformIO downloaded a whole bunch of tools and then executed them, even though they seemed completely irrelevant to my project.

After the excessively long procedure completed, I scrolled back to investigate what happened. I eventually figured out building everything meant building my Arduino sketch for every piece of hardware PlatformIO supported for use with Arduino framework. So it didn’t just build for the ATmega328P chip on my Arduino Nano, it also downloaded tools and built for SAMD-based Arduinos. Then downloaded and built for ESP32 Arduino. Then NXP, etc. So on and so forth.