Simulate Arduino Code in Your Browser

Arduino boards and their like have made hardware programming easier than ever. If you want to get an LED to blink or other more intricate tasks, however, you're normally still required to get out your board, figure out COM port settings, and transfer the file. For experimentation, if you could simulate sketches on your computer — perhaps even in your browser — the process would go much faster.

To that end, Uri Shaked has come up with AVR8js, which allows you to compile and run Arduino code using JavaScript directly in your browser. His post goes over the details of how this was accomplished, and there's an example early-on that presents you with an arduino sketch, along with a Run button to start the on-screen green LED blinking. This works perfectly, and if you want to get the red sim LED next to it blinking as well, you just need to add the appropriate code, such as pinMode(12, OUTPUT); in the setup section, and the corresponding digital write code in the loop.

As he points out in the write-up, while functional, the code does run slower than real-time. Shaked plans to improve on this and expand on how the simulator is used, so hopefully we'll be seeing this coding environment pop up in the future!