Raspberry Pi Emu (formerly Raspberry Pi Emulator) For Mac

Raspberry Pi single board calculators are great when developing IoT projects or when trying to understand basic computing notions.

The Raspberry Pi Emu (formerly known as Raspberry Pi Emulator) app offers you the possibility to run software designed for the platform even if you don’t have access to the hardware device.

The Raspberry Pi Emu utility comes with a small user interface where you can launch the configuration procedures or start the Raspberry Pi images. The emulator provides support for configuring the runtime setup and for installing the operating system images.

Worth mentioning is that Raspberry Pi Emulator will deal with both tasks via the command line so that you can monitor the progress of each task from a Terminal window.

Even if you don’t configure the OS images beforehand, when you try to start the emulations for the first time, Raspberry Pi Emu will automatically download the appropriate Raspberry Pi image and start deploying the software.

Once everything is configured, Raspberry Pi Emu will launch the Qemu tool, and you get to start the Raspberry Pi image by using the “startx” command via the command line. Note that you might need to be patient for the simulation to load.

Within the Raspberry Pi Emu simulation window you can use both your mouse and the keyboard, but note that you have to press the Control and Option keys at the same time to release the cursor and interact with other apps running on your Mac.

Raspberry Pi Emu is designed to help you run code and develop projects without making the presence of a Raspberry Pi hardware device necessary.

The project provides support for both Raspberry Pi 1 and Raspberry Pi 2 devices, the emulations come with network access, and you can work with different boot disks.