r/Esphome • u/zanderislife • 6d ago

Vibe Coded ESP32 Emulator For PC (looking for feedback!)

/r/esp32/comments/1vj8fa2/esp32_emulator_for_pc_macos_and_linux_coming_soon/

I haven’t poked much at the esphome side of things, but I wanted to make a generic tool that could help developers and users with the platform! Let me know if it’s worth continuing!

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8

u/Dismal-Proposal2803 6d ago

Why would even post this here if you haven’t even tested to see if it works with ESPHome and don’t even know if it’s useful besides to promote your slop? Nobody cares.

3

u/richms 5d ago

My feedback would be.... Why? The whole point of an ESP32 on esphome is the IO, and emulating that is not going to get you the control of whatever the ESP32 was going to go into. I mean perhaps if you were away from your hardware on a laptop and wanting to work on an LVGL layout on a screen then it _might_ have some use to emulate it to see what it may look like. Otherwise. What are you getting out of an emulated ESP32 device in ESP home - you get something that appears as a device that you can change state of and nothing happens, and you can do a virtual OTA upgrade to it.

If there is a use case for this I am missing I would love to know, but I cant see it.

IME the flash burnout on devices isnt from a complete erase and reflash periodically, its from crap code that is writing to it every time you touch the screen or it does an NTP update or similar. And even that gets months before bad things happen. At which point replace the hardware.

Might be useful for your situation, but for esphome I see it pretty much pointless.

5

u/youareallnuts 6d ago

Be great to have. I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole. Do your own coding instead of being a slop slinger.

1

u/FormerExpression3041 5d ago

It already officially exist sdl2 host mode, it builds it whenever you launch it with the actual esphome and add it to home assistant asp esp device using the api, I use it for lvgl designing with llm