We can sympathize with [Benjamin Cabé]. He has a lot of development boards and it has become painful to maintain the many toolchains for each board. We’ve also suffered from upgrading one tool breaks another tool in some obscure way. His solution? Use Github Codespaces which you can get early access for beta testers.
The idea is that you can spin off a container-specific to a GitHub repository that has all the proper versions and dependencies required to work with a project.
If you sign up for the beta, you’ll be on a waitlist, but it is interesting to see [Benjamin] go through the steps. The service is free during the beta and you get two codespaces. Presumably, you’ll eventually be able to pay for more capability.
The idea is good, but we’ll have to see about the implementation. A preconfigured container might move from machine to machine or even to deep storage for later reconstitution. Flashing the binary image to the device looked painful from the browser. We’ve seen it done nicely with, for example, the online Arduino IDE but it did take some installable software helpers to do that.
We’ll be curious about how many different platforms this will support. However, you can roll your own version of this and avoid the cloud using Docker or even a full-blown VM like VirtualBox. Sure, it is more work, but you control your destiny. Add something like Platform.IO and your choice of development tools and you can avoid having so many competing development tools all in your main computer.
