sorry, my mistake, to I thought that You are looking for some emulator for python (not micro python) Rasspbbery pi platform, or even in Macos/win.

I used luma for oled 0.91 display emulation for design menu system for esp32. ; python pynput.keyboard for keyboard (buttons) interaction ( or just call callback function for keys - even better since all can be done from program).

There is no support for this way of working. You'll have to use real hardware or write your own support.

I guess you could write an emulator using (e.g.) pygame and CPython, but then you'd need to write a FrameBuffer class for CPython (the MP class is written in C). A nontrivial task. I'm not convinced an emulator would save much time in practice. With the right tools (mpremote, rshell) development with real hardware can be quite quick.

luma has a lot of SSD family drivcers simulators, in my case i used to emulate ssd1306 oleds 0.91/0.96 inch do design menu system for esp32 micropython, but all in python (luma was deeded to all fancy 'icons' drawnings).

Menu/GUI system can be 'split' for : display rendering and for interaction with peripherals ( buttons, etc) -> all this part need to be implemented as some display rendering functions and some callback functions for interaction ( callback "connected" to button action). In simplest way we do not even need physical button, just call a callback function responsible for assigned button action.
Most of work is just some classes implementing and can be done in python (just need to know difference betwen micropython-vs-python) for faster R&D .

edit. I forgot to mention than luma will not work on windows system ( no ioctl).
other method for modelling oled display is using python PIL lib

The whole thing is a substantial task. Rewriting C code in Python is straightforward but time consuming. Then you have to add the pygame stuff.

I would compare the effort to buying a display which supports a Pico plugged in the back and mounting it in a box. Plug the USB lead into your laptop and develop anywhere. That is my approach, but the choice is yours.

Yes, I'm not sure to want to dig into C that much!
As you say, it is more fun to build a real hardware stuff ;o)
Thanks,

The file modframebuf.c is quite substantial. While an emulator would be an interesting project it would take quite a lot of writing and testing. If the emulation wasn't spot-on it would be more trouble than it's worth.

My view of MP development is to use real hardware with simple command-line tools.

It works great, thanks!
I need to dig into your examples, but I'm pretty sure it will be very easy to adapt them to my use case.
Again, great job!

That's awesome work @russhughes, thanks for your efforts! Could definitely have used this in the past.

Not to take anything, at all!, away from your excellent work, but it sparked a few (some old) thoughts and I thought I'd share:

• It would be interesting to see if it were possible to make this a native module to reduce the build friction and ease deployment.
• I wonder if this could also be implemented with ffi. Could possibly be written entirely in Python. Even easier to deploy.
• I've wanted a similar solution, but to render the output to an HTML canvas, with data transferred over a web socket. The benefit would be that it could also be used easily from within a container.

+1 for native module!

@mattytrentini @fma38 I'll look into it.

@mattytrentini @fma38 I don't see a way to link an external library like SDL2 with a native .mpy module without modifying MicroPython. I'm temped to try adding dlopen, dlsyn, dlclose, and dlerror to the mp_fun_table to see if that is a way around natmod linking limitations.