Nakul Rao has been working on a virtual machine for the Arduino. He notes, ‘Why a virtual machine? Firstly, I had a lot of time. Secondly, because it can be done. Also, it is fascinating to me that a device can keep its actual hardware hidden and project an entirely different hardware to the user. I have to say that I have not had any formal education on virtual machine. So I don’t know for sure if this fits into the ‘definition’ of a virtual machine but I’m certain that it can at least be called a quasi-virtual machine.
I have designed this for Arduino Mega and so had no memory issues. The basic firmware running on the Arduino is about 10kb. So Uno is out of the picture. But you can try to optimize the code and fit it into a Uno.”
You can read more on this project on Nakul’s blog. The source code is also available on GitHub.