Embedded systems programmers who have to turn their hand to a wide range of boards will be familiar with the problem: the development environment supplied by a manufacturer will only run under one particular operating system and will only talk to a certain range of microcontroller devices. Other environments may be more universal, but may be limited in functionality or (sometimes extremely) pricey. The PlatformIO universal environment aims to overcome these disadvantages: it supports a wide range of operating systems, boards and development environments and offers many useful functions. With the help of some simple examples we show you how to get started.