Hi, micro-ROS community!

As you might know, PlatformIO has become a really popular solution for embedded development, it provides a complete embedded development environment compatible with tons of boards, frameworks, and platforms.

Most of you have been using our micro-ROS for Arduino library to integrate micro-ROS in the PlatformIO environment, but we think that we can do it much better. So, we have been developing a proper solution for integrating the micro-ROS build system in the PlatformIO build system.

micro-ROS for Arduino provide a precompiled set of libraries due to the lack of advanced features for building the micro-ROS stack in the Arduino IDE/CLI development environment. Meanwhile, PlatformIO allows complex build processes where the micro-ROS library can be compiled just in time for the used platform avoiding cross-compilation compatibility issues. Also, it provides a much more flexible way of configuring the micro-ROS library with custom packages and/or custom middleware configurations.

We have reached a semi-functional status where some platforms are supported but we need your help to provide feedback and comments about your needs as micro-ROS developers. So we are opening a beta testing period before releasing this tool on the PlatformIO registry.

We ask the community to:

• test current available boards and transports
• add / request / recommend new boards and transports
• test the whole functionality and advice new features

Sincerely, the micro-ROS team.

Technical details

The micro-ROS library for PlatformIO is designed to be modular. It relies on the advanced scripting features of the build system. As you can see in extra_script.py, the library is being built on the fly using the compiler and flags that the environment provides.

In platform_code folder we include sources related to the framework. In this case, only arduino is implemented.

This way, arduino/clock_gettime.cpp provides a the timing functionality required by micro-ROS using the Arduino API. As you can see, there are much more interesting frameworks such as CMSIS, FreeRTOS, libopencm3 or Zephyr RTOS. That means that those frameworks should be integrated creating [FRAMEWORK]/clock_gettime.cpp and adding the corresponding scripting here.

Regarding the transports, they are also included in the framework folder. For example, the Serial transport for arduino is implemented using the Serial API of the Arduino framework. One more time, the extra_script.py takes care of building the required transport. In the same way, by adding folders to this directory tree, more transports can be implemented using different frameworks APIs.

This way you can create a PlaformIO project with the following .ini:

[env:portenta_h7_m7]
platform = ststm32
board = portenta_h7_m7
framework = arduino
microros_transport = serial
microros_distro = galactic
lib_deps =
 https://github.com/micro-ROS/micro_ros_platformio

.meta files can be added to the enviroment configuration just using microros_user_meta = [PATH TO YOUR META] . This will override parameters of the micro-ROS build.

Tasks to be done

The following tasks should be addressed:

Board testing

The following use cases shall be tested in hardware: