I've been playing with Arduino for the first time over the last week and have written a few simple programs.� I found your project yesterday - congratulations on an excellent piece of work - and was therefore tempted to write something a little more complex.

Inevitably, it didn't work, and after a couple of hours of print-statement debugging it became clear that an emulator would be easier.� So I bolted together a quick software dummy of the Protosnap I'm playing with:� on VS the entire debug then took ten minutes.

From that experience, I completely endorse the idea of an emulating Windows program.

sticks wrote on Oct 11^th, 2011 at 8:56pm:


Well, nothing very subtle.� I just modelled the Arduino Serial class as an object in my main program, which for testing I call instead of the COM port.� I also link in the Arduino sketch along with a header that provides versions of the functions it calls.

When the dummy port� has received a message (in this cased defined as a null-terminated ASCII string), it calls loop() and the Arduino program gets to run and do its thing until the message is eaten.

I was trying to debug a simple messaging-protocol - doing it this way allowed me to debug the code within VS in the normal way, which - since it wasn't very good code - was hugely faster than doing it on the Arduino itself.� When that worked, I simply compiled it within the Arduino project and carried on.

This is very handy for any part of the Arduino code not tied to details of the hardware (though I did also model the LEDs, switches and buzzer on the ProtoSnap).� But it's obviously not a full-up emulator

Hi,

I think that being able to easily switch target platform is very important, and even fondamental as no debugger can be used on Arduino boards (isn't it ?)

A first step in emulation could be to have a new platforme, distinct to the Win32 one, nothing more.
From this step, and thanks to "WIN32" or "ARDUINO" macros (or __AVR_ATmega328P__, ...), it will be easy for everyone to forward lowlevel calls to platforme specific ones. Emulation features can come later.

Anyone using a LCD shied can use the great and easy to use the great pixeltoaster library for exemple. http://code.google.com/p/pixeltoaster/.