Thanks tomhow! The idea for building the Air Lab simulator was very much inspired by the feedback I got from you. Here is a bit of background for the other readers:

I reached out to HN by mail (as suggested on their tips page) to gauge whether my story/product was allowed to be posted as a Show HN post. They pointed out that HN requires a more "direct" demo of things. Their suggestion was to create a "raw" video showing how the device works and feels. It made a lot of sense to me. However, as a designer by training, it’s hard for me to produce something like that, as I naturally gravitate towards polishing it too much. When discussing this dilemma with my colleague, we remembered an idea I had some time ago about creating interactive renderings for the Air Lab website. Quickly, we agreed that this would be worth testing, as the whole goal of the video was to give the HN community a feel for the device.

As mentioned in my comment and the Crowd Supply update, I used emscripten to compile the stock firmware to WASM. Luckily, by that time, I was already mostly done with extracting a hardware abstraction-layer from the firmware. This meant that I already had a nice API that I needed to ”mock” and connect to the fake sensors and controls on the website. So most of the work for that week was to actually build the simulator app using Ember.js around the compiled firmware and integrate it. By doing that, I also found a couple of bugs in the firmware itself that have been much easier to debug with the simulator than with a real device.

I can recommend to anyone to reach out to the HN moderators and validate their post. Especially, if it is not a software thing that one can immediately try out. But also then, I think most posts/projects could profit from a more interactive demo.