Transition from Arduino IDE to PlatformIO

[bizmythy]

PlatformIO is an alternative to the Arduino IDE and build system. It improves the user experience by letting you use VS Code to write programs with integrated Intellisense and helpful tools to manage libraries, boards, and projects. It allows for libraries to be configured locally to a project, meaning projects know what libraries to expect and exactly which version to get, preventing issues with different library versions on the same machine. It also has a CLI and a headless build system, which should allow us to do the headless builds we do currently with the new build system.

I need to do further research to be confident that it would be an improvement, but in my personal projects it has been a big upgrade over the Arduino IDE. I wanted to go ahead and put this up to get people's thoughts on this. Documentation for the project is here.

This is extremely low priority and just a small qol improvement. Probably something I will poke around with time permitting.

[vedarshshah]

We don't use the Arduino IDE to develop Arduino code. We develop it directly in VS Code and upload it to the Arduino using the arduino.py CLI. We used the Arduino IDE primarily for its serial monitor, but the inclusion of VS Code's serial monitor extension in minor-fixes-3 removes this need. Thus, we don't need to use PlatformIO at this time.