wokwi-features VS avr8js

No, no - I have a half a dozen RPi's of varying revisions. Since they run Linux and the SDcards are less than robust, anytime you accidentially trip the power (which to me happens several times during hardware debugging sessions) you risk scrambling the rootfs and thus need to reflash a new SDcard. Some SDcards get damaged.

I recommend using Arduino and/or Wokwi (https://wokwi.com/) to get started.

More Wokwi Integration: Wokwi is an amazing embedded simulator and is great for getting started quickly. For a learner, there's no need for toolchain setup or even the purchase of hardware. There are many features as well that make it quite a flexible tool supporting a lot of features right from the browser. Users can also vote for more features. Still maybe at some point, one might want to tinker with physical hardware. However, at that point, they would have gained some confidence first. Currently, only ESP boards are supported with Rust on Wokwi. I hope for the variety to expand soon.

In addition to the other great suggestions here I wanted to point out that you can practice and learn a lot for free using an online simulator such as wokwi.com and tinkercad.com (among others)! And you don't have to buy an Arduino or any parts to get started!

And you can prototype all of this first to get it working for free using an online simulator at sites like wokwi.com or tinkercad.com!

If you don't have the budget for real hardware consider the simulator at https://wokwi.com/ It works with Rust (at least for ESP32, haven't tried other architectures). Bonus: you can't blow up the electronics by a wiring mistake.

I spent a bit of time today with a few FastLED programs and uploaded them to wokwi.com on a simulated Arduino Nano and a WS2812 strip of 64 LED's (not in a 2D matrix). The chatgpt requests I made were:

https://tinyurl.com/yr34sym6

https://wokwi.com/ is great for simple, digital only stuff.

https://fritzing.org/ will kind of lay out the PCB for you, but it's kind of a pain in the ass.

Wokwi and Fritzing are more "Breadboard Simulators" than real circuit simulators, but they do have their place.

Another cool thing you may want to try is making a simulator https://wokwi.com/

Wokwi is free open source and neat with an MIT license https://github.com/wokwi/avr8js https://wokwi.com

What I really want is a modern microcontroller emulator. avr8js is really spectacular. Execute Code provides a great way to run C, C++, and Rust snippets, but running a program on an OS versus on an MCU is very different and code is generally not very portable between them.

We simulate the actual Arduino hardware (based on this avr8js repo) which runs the compiled Arduino code. To compile the code itself, we use Arduino CLI.

Check out something like https://github.com/wokwi/avr8js

Here Uri is tackling a subtle but impactful bug in the AVR simulator. He starts by analyzing a tiny Arduino program that shows the problem: an LED turns off when it shouldn't. Then we dive into the assembly code, and take a look at the implementation of the offending instructions in the simulator's source code. Once we pinned down the bug (pun intended), we create a regression test case and change the simulator's code until the tests are all green again. Enjoy the ride! ▸ GitHub issue with the all details: https://github.com/wokwi/avr8js/issue... ▸ Wokwi online Arduino simulator: https://wokwi.com

I hope you have heard about the Wokwi Arduino Simulator. There is an engine thatthat is open source. You can hop on the discord channel and get more help/support from the community over there. there are a lot of welcoming active people helping out each other.

This is a completely free Arduino simulator based on the AVR8js engine (open-source on GitHub)/

I don't know whether you saw it, but /u/wokwi has actually done a similar thing with https://github.com/wokwi/avr8js in a totally different way - no WASM, an AVR implementation in JavaScript. Total madness but it works!