A few friends and I have decided to design a simulator for the PIC16F87xA series of microcontrollers as our final semester project. Most of the simulators and compilers available for the PIC microcontroller are commercial software. Microchip corporation’s Assembler is free, but not open source, and the C compiler that they offer is commercial.

There are quite a few open source counterparts, and gpsim is especially good among them, but still, all of them lack a good interface and are in no way friendly for the beginner.

That’s why we decided to go with this project, and if it turns out to be good, it will be released under the GNU public license. Initially we are planning to design the simulator using Visual C#, and then port it to Python at a later time.

If time permits, we will also try to include a few other PIC microcontrollers, and we even have plans for the ARM microcontroller. I guess we will be having some trouble with the C compiler part. Hope my CSE friends come to the rescue.