This is a really silly one but it tripped me up for far longer than I care to admit. In essence, the issues I was having is that I would successfully compile and upload my code in PlatformIO but for some reason it wouldn’t execute on the device. I tried many, many things, including a complete re-install of the environment to no avail.

The issue was that I was placing my code file at the root of the project file structure (where the red X is above) and not in the SRC directory (where the green tick is above). Thus, when I created a new project using PlatformIO, it created a new empty main.cpp in the SRC directory and was actually compiling that and uploaded that to my device. Because this default template effectively did nothing, the device looked as though it wasn’t working.

Without knowing this, I had create my code in a file, also called main.cpp, but at the root of the project structure that was never being compiled and uploaded! D’Oh!

Once I had my code in the main.cpp file in the SRC directory, it uploaded and executed on the device as expected. I probably should have read the PlatformIO documentation first:

PlatformIO IDE for VSCode

alas, I didn’t and thereby wasted hours trying to work out what was wrong! I’m glad that I’ve now worked it out and I’m sharing just in case someone else has the same issue, as I did spend heaps of time searching for a solution and found none that pointed out my error of file location.