Simulator on PC

You can try out LVGL using only your PC (i.e. without any development boards). LVGL will run on a simulator environment on the PC where anyone can write and experiment with real LVGL applications.

Using the simulator on a PC has the following advantages:

• Hardware independent: Write code, run it on the PC and see the result on a monitor.

• Cross-platform: Any Windows, Linux or macOS system can run the PC simulator.

• Portability: The written code is portable, which means you can simply copy it when migrating to embedded hardware.

• Easy Validation: The simulator is also very useful to report bugs because it provides a common platform for every user.

• Better developer experience: On PC Debuggers are usually faster and better, you can log to files, add a lot of printf s, do profiling, and so on.

Select an IDE

The simulator is ported to various IDEs (Integrated Development Environments). Choose your favorite IDE, read its README on GitHub, download the project, and load it to the IDE.

• Eclipse with SDL driver: Recommended on Linux and Mac, supports CMake as well

• VisualStudio: Recommended on Windows

• VSCode with SDL driver: Recommended on Linux (SDL) and Mac (SDL)

• CodeBlocks: Recommended on Windows

• PlatformIO with SDL driver: Recommended on Linux and Mac but has an STM32 environment as well

• Generic Linux: CMake based project where you can easily switch between fbdev, DRM, and SDL.

• MDK with FastModel: For Windows

External project not maintained by the LVGL organization:

• QT Creator: Cross platform

Built-in drivers

LVGL comes with several built-in drivers.

Even if a simulator project comes with e.g. SDL, you can easily replace it by enabling another driver in lv_conf.h and calling its create function.

For example to use the Linux frame buffer device instead of SDL just enable LV_USE_LINUX_FBDEV and call

lv_display_t *display = lv_linux_fbdev_create();
lv_linux_fbdev_set_file(display, "/dev/fb0")