Arduino Simulator?

Is there a usable or useful Ardunio simulator that anyone has found or uses on the lines of the excellent PE6 which works with the Picaxe chips?

Or is a simulator not really needed with Ardunio?

Just looking around and getting all sorts of confusing signals for a beginner!

Thanks Peter

I use Autocad's Arduino simulator

Can be found at https://circuits.io

Paul

Not sure I can help much because I've never used one. They do exist. Many are aimed particularly at the Arduino but there are also simulators for the AVR chipset which the Arduino is based on.

There are three reasons why I've not used a simulator:

• Care is needed emulating the circuit that the Arduino is connected to. You can end up chasing your tail if that set-up is faulty. I find it easier to debug a real Arduino plus electronics with an oscilloscope. I've never done anything complex enough to justify a simulation.
• On the software side I'm both old fashioned and expensively trained. As 'C' is 'C', I test and debug all the Arduino functions that aren't hardware specific on Linux. Linux has lots of heavy duty development tools.
• Choosing a simulator and learning to use it is hard work. For the Arduino there doesn't seem to be a single straightforward choice. Instead, there are several each with advantages and disadvantages that I don't really understand. Lazy I know, but I can't be bothered to investigate. If I really needed a simulator I'd put the effort in, perhaps going direct to the AVR tooling.

If anyone can recommend a simulator I'd be pleased to hear of it. The main thing I miss on the Arduino is onboard debugging: I suspect it's not available for the Arduino simply because it's a hobby platform. Arduinos are not intended to replace the grown-up tools available for the AVR.

Dave

Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 29/09/2017 16:20:43

Given the low cost of an Arduino, why would you not just use the real thing? As the whole point of the Arduino is to control things, for a useful simulation you would need to provide physical I/O anyway which would cost as much or more!

I'm reminded of the story in Gulliver's Travels about the country that decided to make a map of the whole territory at 1:1 scale. They found that it was rather too big to be convenient, wouldn't easily fold, and kept the sun and rain off the crops! So they decided to revert back to using the real place...

In fact it turns out that Studio 7 has native arduino support!

Atmel Studio 7 features seamless one-click import of projects created in the Arduino development environment. Your sketch, including any libraries it references, will be imported into Studio 7 as a C++ project. Once imported, you can leverage the full capabilities of Studio 7 to fine-tune and debug your design. Atmel Studio 7 fully supports the powerful embedded debugger on the Arduino Zero board. For other Arduino boards, shield-adapters that expose debug connectors are available, or switch to one of the many available Xplained-Mini/PRO boards to fully leverage the Atmel HW eco-system. Regardless of what you choose, you will surely make something amazing.