Hardware can be a pain sometimes. There's all those wires, and solder, and burnt circuits.  Wouldn't it be great if we had Arduinos in the Matrix ?

There's been a buzz flying about making one. 

We had one which worked for a little bit - but after all the MrlComm code its noWorky.  It was also comprised of a generalized VirtualDevice service (perhaps too general) & a Arduino.py.   I made them, but I'm not really interested much in supporting them.  I initally was thinking Python would allow for more crazy hardware emulations, but its a little too unstructured.

Kwatters came up with the great idea of making a C++ emulator which could run MrlComm, it could also provide an interface which would allow Mrl Java Arduino service to attach to it.  This we we get 2 sides of testing - We can test with the 'real' MrlComm connected to a 'real' MRL Arduino service.  The C++ app is the binder/emulator.

Then I thought of making a VirtualArduino.  It wont have the capability of running or testing the MrlComm.  But it would take me relatively small amount of time to create it. And it could provide testing for Java land services - in addition, be a useful tool, interfacing with other 3D simulators like Unity (javaland).

Existing Arduino Emulators

http://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/61/can-i-program-for-arduino…