Mosscap

Mosscap is a simulation platform for Arduino based robots. The goal of this project is to provide a tool that can be used for robotics education from high school through college. Essentially, Mosscap addresses the problem statement:

Robotics hardware is often prohibitively expensive. Even simple wheeled mobile robot kits that can be purchased on Amazon can exceed $100 in cost, which puts them out of reach for many students or hobbyists.

Additionally, many software based educational tools and simulators provide their own barriers to entry in the form of complicated installation and usage patterns, along with large amounts of assumed prerequisite knowledge for their use.

Naturally, the question arises: How might one create an educational robotics platform that is simple to install and use, and that can leverage users' existing knowledge to provide educational opportunities without such barriers to entry?

Mosscap addresses this problem by packaging a lightweight physics simulator and Arduino interface into a VS Code extension to allow for simple installation. It leverages WebAssembly through emscripten to compile a user's Arduino sketch and open the simulation interface in browser.

This circumvents the hassle of c++ build systems and dependency management and simplifies the usage requirements to two simple items:

1. Do you have a computer?
2. Can that computer run VS Code?

Currently, Mosscap cannot run in the web version of VS Code. Although this is certainly a goal for the future.

Usage

More info to come soon!