Platformio

PlatformIO is a SDK/toolchain manager for various microcontrollers and and embedded platforms i.e. esp32.

Basic development environment

{ pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> {} }:
let
in
  pkgs.mkShell {
    buildInputs = [
      pkgs.platformio
      # optional: needed as a programmer i.e. for esp32
      # pkgs.avrdude
    ];
}

NixOS

Add the required udev rules.

{
  services.udev.packages = [ 
    pkgs.platformio-core
    pkgs.openocd
  ];
}

Use in vscode

To use the nix-shell provided PlatformIO rather the builtin one first open vscode within the nix-shell and also modify it's settings.json to also contain the following line:

{
      "platformio-ide.useBuiltinPIOCore": false,
}

As of PlatformIO IDE 2.0.0, you will need a shell that allows the extension to run “python -m platformio” (#237313):

Recently (2024?) simply building an FHS shell with the referred nixpkgs commit doesn't work anymore. The modification is probably incompatible with newer nixpkgs.

There's a quick&dirty fix available as a flake devShell. For usage with direnv (recommended), make an .envrc in your project dir like this:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

PRJROOT="$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)"
FLAKE=github:ppenguin/nixenvs

# avoid a "load loop" of direnv when the new fhs env is entered
# https://github.com/direnv/direnv/issues/992
if [ -z "$IN_NIX_SHELL" ]; then
use flake $FLAKE\#pio-arduino-fhs
fi

export PRJROOT

This will start a the devShell defined here: https://github.com/ppenguin/nixenvs/blob/main/dev/devshell-pio-arduino-fhs.nix, which includes a working update of the platformio python module for nixpkgs.

See also

• Platformio permission denied[13]