PlatformIO VS scons

For the ESP32 in read mode, we've successfully developed a project using PlatformIO that accepts the key during build time and stores it in memory.

Check out Zephyr OS and Platform IO. Zephyr is part of the Linux foundation and has similarities to Linux with how it performs hardware abstraction (device tree). Platform IO integrates with other frameworks including mbed and Arduino.

PlatformIO together with avr-stub can be used to do source level debugging but there are some caveats.

Look into https://platformio.org/, it can abstract over a few RTOSes, and can show you which OSes work with which chips/boards.

If the HW looks like it works, you could also try alternate programming software. (e.g. TinyGo or PlatformIO)

You might have better luck with PlatformIO than the Arduino IDE; it's better at automatically choosing the serial port, though I can't say I've used it under Windows.

My other suggestion takes more work but will make your life oh so much better. Professionally I have used and highly recommend. https://platformio.org/ which is free!

Will you be doing embedded Linux? Embedded RTOS? Bare metal? Microcontrollers? SoC (say, FPGA with a hard processor core)?

You can do a lot with QEMU. https://bootlin.com/ has a lot of great, free training material.

https://bootlin.com/doc/training/embedded-linux-qemu/embedde...

is one of my favorites.

Learning to cross-compile, do embedded debugging, the process of booting an embedded system (which varies depending on the answers to the above questions), learning how to read a technical reference for the processor you’re using as well as for peripherals you’re likely to interact with - SPI, i2c, UART, maybe PCIe, are all handy skills. Learn a bit about JTAG, hardware, reading schematics, etc. Even being able solder is helpful.

There may be books (I had a great embedded Linux book when I started) but there are lots of online materials too. Check out https://platformio.org/

There are fun embedded boards and projects for microcontrollers too - micropython on an rpi pico, tinygo, eLua, etc.

The most comprehensive make alternative in python I've seen is Scons (https://scons.org/)

It would be worth to see how they tackles some of the challenges you're looking into.

Blurb from the website:

SCons is an Open Source software construction tool. Think of SCons as an improved, cross-platform substitute for the classic Make utility with integrated functionality similar to autoconf/automake and compiler caches such as ccache. In short, SCons is an easier, more reliable and faster way to build software.

SCons never got popular enough to escape the niches it grew up in.

i literally do almost this exact thing with the game im working on. situation is: im the programmer, working with an artist who cant code (and im not going to make them edit json on an ipad lmao) so i have a google drive spreadsheet where they put metadata for the items they make. i have a script that uses rclone to copy this down as a csv, along with the image assets. then i wrote a python extension for scons that converts it to json (and also does some image processing/cropping because evidently procreate's export options are very limited). from here, i originally had an import plugin that would automatically import the json files as godot resources. however, i eventually decided to instead write a standalone script in gdscript (invoked with godot --script --headless myscript.gd) that would do the conversion ahead of import, mainly because i wanted to be able to have the game assets be more self-contained (like, so that an item has its texture in the same resource file instead of in a separate file referenced from the json). i then modified my scons build scripts to call this script.

it's a build tool, like cmake. https://scons.org/ you have to install it.