Emulino is an emulator for the Arduino platform by Greg Hewgill, originally found on emulino: arduino cpu emulator.

With it, you can build ("Verify") a .pde sketch in Arduino IDE which uses serial port for communication to say a .hex file, and then you can invoke the emulino executable with the .hex file as an argument, and get a local simulation of how an Arduino would behave; useful for debugging without wasting burn cycles on the Arduino's AVR chip.


Here is a brief overview of steps to get emulino built in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid:

sudo apt-get install git # to check out the source
sudo apt-get install scons # to build the source
git clone git://github.com/ghewgill/emulino.git
cd emulino/
which python # see what your python executable is 
nano SConstruct # replace '/opt/local/bin/python2.5' with your python executable
scons # build

The result is an executable (which is also posted on http://sourceforge.net/projects/sdaaubckp/files/emulino/10.04/emulino/download); the executable also works on 9.04.


For instance, one could use the following simple code, which simply increases a counter and writes its value on serial, as test.pde in Arduino IDE:

int counter = 0;

void setup()
        // initiate Arduino serial communication

void loop()
  counter = counter + 1;
  Serial.print("Counter: ");
  Serial.print(counter, DEC);

By clicking on "Verify", the code is built - and during a "Verify" the .hex file is written to /tmp. In order to simulate the code, one can simply call emulino with the path to the hex file as argument:

$ ./emulino /tmp/build523158875647966391.tmp/test.cpp.hex 
emulino: Loading hex image: /tmp/build523158875647966391.tmp/test.cpp.hex
Counter: 1
Counter: 2
Counter: 3
Counter: 4

Serial-'std' in-out

Note that, in principle, emulino uses stdin and stdout of the console to simulate serial input/output. There is a command switch "-io" which should allow input/output to/from files (which have fixed names of name-of-hexfile.hex.in and name-of-hexfile.hex.out), however I cannot get it to work every time (maybe instead of files, one should use mknod and named pipes; not sure).

Note however the example below - which reads a character from serial and echoes it back to serial:

static unsigned char _c; 

void setup() 

void loop() 

  // read in a byte, and send it back immediately 
        // send data only when you receive data: 
        if (Serial.available() > 0) {
                // read the incoming byte:
                _c = Serial.read();

                // say what you got:
        // must have delay for emulino to work


In this example, if the delay statement is missing, then emulino will never register that a character came in from "serial"; with the delay statement, a command like session will look like:

$ stty -icanon ; ./emulino /tmp/buildXXX.tmp/test.cpp.hex
emulino: Loading hex image: /tmp/buildXXX.tmp/test.cpp.hex
tteessttiinngg  bbuuttttoonn  pprreessss^C

Note again that "stty -icanon" seems to be needed, in order to set up the terminal as a character device - so that keypresses are passed on to "stdin" per individual character basis.

Emulino (last edited 2010-09-13 11:22:10 by sd-imi)