Is there a simulator for running nerves without the actual hardware?

There’s a qemu nerves system, which runs within qemu on your host system to have an actual nerves VM, but that doesn’t really virtualize any hardware you’d find on a board. I’ve mocked out a bunch of hardware in the past though and it can be done at various levels of the abstractions or communication layers used. Depending on where you land and what hardware it is it might require quite some intimate knowledge of the hardware though.

https://github.com/nerves-project/nerves_system_qemu_aarch64

Your first simulator is your computer. Running in host is a great thing and the name_badge repo used for the Nerves Starter Kit and in Gus’ talks can run on the host and that’s when the display simulator comes in for that. Usually there are only a few pieces of hardware worth mocking.

There are also the circuits sim tools for simulating various bits of hardware: GitHub - elixir-circuits/circuits_sim: Elixir Circuits device simulator · GitHub

Benjamin mentioned the qemu system which is great if you want to have the full experience of a Nerves device without any pesky physical reality involved. That runs on a VM.

So it depends on what you want to do. Qemu sounds about right for your question.