This is certainly a neat project, and an accomplishment in its own right. > The Arduino IDE usually requires a physical board, which can be cumbersome. But th

This is certainly a neat project, and an accomplishment in its own right. > The Arduino IDE usually requires a physical board, which can be cumbersome. But this is the part that makes me a bit uncomfortable. One reason I got into Arduinos a few years ago was that I felt I was getting entirely detached from interacting with any physical aspects of engineering, and learning that, however clumsily (including occasionally burning my fingertips or destroying an unfortunate LED or capacitor) was an interesting part of electronics. I feel that taking the whole experience virtual is sort of missing the point (Like teaching driving instructions classes in GTA ;-), and as a software engineer, I constantly tried to resist the inner urge to pull every project back into a software direction (No, the project does not need to run an OS, or run on a GHz clocked CPU, or need a ton of storage…).