On the design and implementation of a virtual machine for arduino

Abstract

Arduino has become one of the most popular platforms for building electronic projects, especially among novices. In the last years countless tools, environments, and programming languages have been developed to support Arduino. One of these is Physical Etoys, a visual programming platform for robots developed by the authors. Physical Etoys supports compiling programs into the arduino. For this to work, a Smalltalk to C++ translator has been built. Although it has been very useful, this translator has brought a new set of issues. In this paper we will discuss some of these problems and how we decided to overcome them by developing a simple virtual machine that will be used as the base for the new Physical Etoys.