Hi HN,
I’ve been working on esp32sim, an open-source ESP32 emulator that runs in the browser.
The fun part of the demo is that there is no ESP32 involved — the firmware is executing in the emulator.
The goal is to make ESP32 software easier to experiment with, test and simulate without always needing physical hardware connected.
Source: https://github.com/mikroverk/esp32sim
I made a short video showing it in action: https://youtu.be/waoWFilTWEc
I’m particularly interested in feedback from embedded developers: what would an emulator like this need to support before you’d actually use it for development, testing or CI?
Very cool, that was something I was looking into very recently.
I vibe coded a drone simulator that flys drones by simulating ESP32 in the browser where the actual flight controller C code that runs on real ESP32 is running as WebAssembly: https://mrtksn.github.io/liftlab/
So the drones are flying with the actual ESP32 flight controller and you can flash the real ESP32 board directly.
Outstanding! Very cool.
On a lot of IoT projects, it's easier to create a "functional" software simulator for the hardware part so the mobile and cloud people can get going without having to wait for test hardware. Those simulators work at the level of emulating BLE or WiFi/API commands. Once you have hardware, the simulators are only used in CI/CD testing.
Where I can see this coming handy is instead of a "functional simulator" to actually have real firmware running for each mobile or back-end dev and CI/CD runner.
This emulator is actually pretty cool — especially since it’s based on an ESP32; you can do all sorts of neat things with it, even simple ones:)
I actually want to have a play with this sometime. But honestly, these gigantic, poorly-formatted AI-slop paragraphs like the one below this heading…
https://github.com/mikroverk/esp32sim#boards-esp32-s3
… are just too much with their dense mix of formatting, brackets, semantic punctuation, command line arguments and part numbers etc. (This one is particularly absurd but it's not the only one).
I may be middle-aged now and a non-expert but I am pretty sure these things are generally exhausting to even expert young readers. I would urge you to reconsider how this page is presented.
#this-should-have-been-a-table.
I can tell that a README.md becomes a DONTREADME.md when its contents are:
1) As long as a novel.
2) Poorly formatted.
3) Has several claudisms in each sentence.
It’s also a predictor of the level of slop in a project since it is getting worse with the people talking about “code quality” have now vanished and are no where to be found.
How is this different from Wokwi.com? They’ve been doing for years, and have a large number of microcontrollers emulated.
I will push back against this broad class of question (critisism?), as it could be applied to the large majority of creations people making, exluding a minority of truly novel things, and outright clones.
For a relevant example, look at Show HN: You could make this same post with a slight variation on every one of them.
OSS and the price? It may be vibe coded but the price is free.
This one is vibecoded
Clickable link: https://wokwi.com/