Add PlatformIO Board Support

[mica-alex]

Problem

The P1AM-100 is not directly supported as a board in PlatformIO. It appears that the board library and other dependencies are made available, but P1AM-100 is not listed as a supported board.

• Note: There are currently three (3) issues open on the PlatformIO GitHub project regarding this request as well. One such is Add support for "P1AM-100" board platformio/platform-atmelsam#173.

Proposed Solution

The P1AM-100 board is added to PlatformIO as a supported board to allow simpler and more user-friendly interaction with the P1AM-100 system for advanced use cases.

Additional Information

It would be great to see direct support added for the P1AM-100 board on PlatformIO. While the main/recommended IDE is still Arduino IDE, and should remain so for most customers and use cases, supporting the possibility of more advanced use cases would be very valuable.

• It seems that it could just be a matter of adding a JSON board definition to the appropriate repo on PlatformIO, indicated by this PR: https://github.com/platformio/platform-atmelsam/pull/180/files.
• It also seems like it may just be an alias of the 'mkrzero' board type, indicated here, https://community.automationdirect.com/s/question/0D53u000025WttRCAS/p1am-getting-started. This isn't entirely clear though, and is not very polished for a finalized or long-term solution.

It seems like either way, supporting the P1AM-100 in PlatformIO would fall under NRE (non-recurring engineering). As such, implementing this PlatformIO P1AM-100 support would likely be a one-time development effort, and subsequent updates would require minimal to no effort to mirror on PlatformIO as well (seems like most things already are anyways).

Meta

Thank you for your consideration.

I hope to see support (or movement towards support) for PlatformIO added in the immediate or near future. This has been requested since 2021 and is being discussed again more recently this year as well. I'm not sure if there is a hold-up, or other bottleneck at this point, but it seems like this has been, and is being discussed on both sides again this year.

Reference

• Add support for "P1AM-100" board platformio/platform-atmelsam#173
• Support for P1AM PLC from automation direct. platformio/platform-atmelsam#111
• Support for P1AM-100 platformio/platform-atmelsam#98
• Add support for P1AM-100 platformio/platform-atmelsam#180
• platformio support? #3

[AdamCummick]

Hey @mica-alex ,

Thanks for writing this up. Our understanding is that merging PR#180 that you linked should be all we need to get P1AM-100 support added to Platformio. We aren't sure why the PR hasn't been reviewed, but if anything is wrong on it we'll happily get it corrected.

Thanks
Adam

[mica-alex]

Hi @AdamCummick,

Thank you for the response and information about where things currently stand.

Based on the recent comments on PR#180 (past few months), it seems like there may be an issue compiling P1AM_Serial and/or a need to possibly push the P1AMCore to PlatformIO too.

I'm not sure if you've had the chance to look through the comments there recently, or if those points are something for the PlatformIO team to address on their side, but there do seem to be a few outstanding questions or concerns.

Thanks
@mica-alex

Reference

• Add support for P1AM-100 platformio/platform-atmelsam#180 (comment)
• Add support for P1AM-100 platformio/platform-atmelsam#180 (comment)
• Add support for P1AM-100 platformio/platform-atmelsam#180

[alecwhardy-idex]

I believe the issue with compiling P1AM_Serial is caused by not using this modified Arduino SAMD Core: https://github.com/facts-engineering/P1AMCore