Toolchain

PlatformIO

To build the code, you’ll need to install PlatformIO. This is used as a a replacement for the Arduino IDE, which has a number of shortcomings:

• Poor dependency management - using other people’s code is tricky, and specifying versions of their code is even harder
• No command-line interface - downloading code requires clumsy clicking.

The “Core” version of PlatformIO is sufficient, as that gives you the command line tools.

Once installed, open a terminal and type pio run. This should install all the libraries we depend on, and compile the code.

To upload the program, run pio run -t upload. See the notes about Flashing a program for hardware-related issues with this opperation.

Protobuf

To send messages from the robot to the PC, we use protobuf.

When building the code with pio run, the command protoc --nanopb_out ... will be executed. This requires that protoc, the protobuf compiler, is on the path, and that the nanopb plugin is also installed.

Documentation

The HTML version of this documentation is generated with Sphinx. To generate the help from C++ comments, both Breathe and Doxygen are required.

Once everything is installed, typing make html in the documentation directory should rebuild the documentation.

However, this is not necessary - the documentation will be automatically built by Read the Docs whenever this repository is pushed to.