Simple software simulator for teaching embedded programming

Abstract

This article presents simple software simulator of a microcontroller evaluation board FRDM-KL25Z. The simulator was developed to make it possible to teach our embedded systems course online during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is in principle a software library that handles function calls and register access from student's program and displays the outputs in a console window of a stan-dard desktop application. It does not require any special hardware or software tools except an IDE capable of building C++ applications for the desktop com-puter. It can be easily modified for different microcontrollers and thus can be useful if existing lessons need to be switched from in-person to distance learning at a short notice.