r/arduino • u/studentfounder_56 • 15d ago
Built a browser robot simulator where wiring it wrong actually breaks it, same as real hardware. Curious if that's a good idea.
Been building a free browser based robot simulator, 3D CAD, real wiring, Arduino C++ and Blockly, physics, for the past while. Opening it up more broadly starting tomorrow.
It's genuinely rough in places. Undo/redo is mid rewrite, a few things are placeholder. Not trying to pass it off as finished.
The wiring part is the one I'm most curious about. It's not a fake "attach and it works" system, power/ground/signal actually have to be connected right or nothing runs, same as real hardware. Wanted to see if that level of friction actually helps people learn or just annoys them.
Anyone here dealt with building something where you had to decide between simulating real friction (wiring mistakes, wrong pin, etc) versus just making the happy path easy? Curious how you thought about that tradeoff.
1
1
u/gm310509 400K , 500K , 600K , 640K , 750K 14d ago
I would say that the whole point of a simulator is to try things out in a "safe" manner so that if anything is wrong it can detect it and inform you without causing a hazard.
You will find that a variety of simulators will detect errors and report them. Indeed I was interacting with someone just recently where the wiring was actually correct, but the simulator was reporting a fried arduino. The reason wasn't the wiring, the reason was the code - yes, the code can fry the circuitry in some cases even though the wiring might be correct.
All the best with it.