Is there a good simulator for Raspberry Pi

Question

Sorry to ask this kind of question. Is there any good simulator for Raspberry Pi? because I need to learn more about the raspberry pi but my problem that I can't buy all the sensors such as Temperature /Humidity, distance, Navigation, and Motion. Moreover, I need to communicate with another raspberry pi using Mosquitto (MQTT).

I found this : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/iot-hub/iot-hub-raspberry-pi-web-simulator-get-started but it seems that it needs the raspberry pi to be connected.

I'm looking for any simulation tools that I can connect wire, put sensors, run the code.

Any suggestion will be appreciated.

Thanks In advance.

Answer 1

MQTT is a TCP/IP-based protocol, so you can develop your software on a regular PC, and if done properly, it should work just as well on an RPi.

The sensors are naturally hard to emulate. As a first step, I would just write dummy getTemperature(), getHumidity() etc. functions reading predefined values from a text file. That would get you a system with repeatable behavior you can debug.

Sensors with UART interface can also be purchased and integrated into the system before you get the RPi. For the rest, I'd wait for your final hardware to be available and wouldn't bother spending time on emulation as their behavior would be very different on PC and RPi anyway.