Turbulence

Turbulence is the successor of craft. It's a microcontroller demo based on the Propeller chip from Parallax. External I/O consists of stereo sound (at line level) and a VGA signal.

It was my contribution to the console / real wild competition at Breakpoint 2009. Also check out the pouët page.

Download

• lft_turbulence_h264_capture_720x576 (Presentation video and high quality capture, 720x576, 139.0 MB)
• lft_turbulence_h264_presentation_and_cam_1280x720 (Presentation video and low quality capture, 1280x720, 144.0 MB)
• lft_turbulence_h264_presentation_and_cam_640x360 (Presentation video and low quality capture, 640x360, 45.7 MB)
• turbulence (Binary EEPROM image, 32.0 kB)
• Linus Akesson - Turbulence soundtrack (Soundtrack, MP3, 4.9 MB)

The reverse engineering challenge

(The complete source code for Turbulence will be released when somebody has reverse engineered the binary enough to provide a detailed description of the techniques used in the greetings part (rotating face with text overlays). That's because I want to encourage reverse engineering in general, and because I think it will be a fun challenge.)

Solved!

Greetings to kuroneko at the Propeller forum who finally cracked the reverse engineering challenge, and to Shazz who also worked hard on it. The source code is hereby released.

The propeller

Having worked extensively with the propeller for a while now, I have to say that it's a very unique and enjoyable platform to work with on the assembly language level. It's very cleverly designed, and you often get to be clever and creative yourself while coding for it. It may not lend itself to regular microcontroller applications, where you just want to get some C code up and running and work in the traditional interrupt-based paradigm, but it's the perfect environment for demo programming!