alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Esp32sim – Run ESP32 firmware in the browser
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?
Comments
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.
How is this different from Wokwi.com? They’ve been doing for years, and have a large number of microcontrollers emulated.
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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.