Hey Jack,

I'm totally with you on the idea of emulating the Arduino in software  
in order to speed up development iteration. In addition to the idea of  
automated testing that was one the big motivators for me to start on  
the RAD project in the first place. Once you've represented your  
Arduino program in Ruby, there's no reason we can't use the language's  
powerful metaprogramming features to implement your desires in other  
media besides C running on the actual Arduino itself.

RubyCocoa is a really interesting thought as a platform for this  
project. Another one I've considered for such a simulator is the Shoes  
GUI toolkit:

http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/shoes/

It's written in Ruby and is very simple and easy to use. It also has  
the advantage of being cross-platform so the resulting app would run  
on Linux and Windows (where RAD itself doesn't even run). If the  
project is architected correctly, there's no reason it shouldn't be  
easy to implement multiple front ends to it for different needs.

Which brings me to the architecture itself: I think you'd want to  
model the Arduino as a state machine so you could re-implement each  
RAD command to model how it changed the internal state of the  
microcontroller. You'd probably want to do this in a special simulator  
sub-class that would stand where ArduinoSketch currently stands during  
the compilation process. In fact this simulation back-end would  
probably also form the basis for the testing framework as well.

Those are just my first thoughts, though.

A simulator has definitely been on my internal RAD roadmap so if  
you're excited about this project and wanted to take up some of the  
work, I'd be glad to work with you to get it started.

I hope it's alright, I've copied the Ruby Arduino Development Google  
Group on this email as well so that the folks there can chime in with  
their interest or ideas.

Let me know your thoughts.

yours,

Greg
---
http://grabb.it/users/greg
http://urbanhonking.com/ideasfordozens
http://atduskmusic.com

On Apr 24, 2008, at 3:41 PM, Jack Nutting wrote:

A RAD emulator would certainly be a plus for this project and would
speed up debugging.
As food for thought, I like _Why_'s Shoes module for small projects
like desktop Widgets. For larger larger applications with more
complicated GUI's I prefer using TkRuby which is more heavily
documented. Why's documentation leave much to be desired.