MicroPalooza 2010 at Ground Kontrol (Operation Mission)

This is another clip from Ground Kontrol's MicroPalooza chiptune music event on September 24th, 2010.

It was quite dark and my vantage point left the performers mostly backlit, so since I was babysitting the laser I spent most of my time filming that.

The laser is a Laserworld CS-400RGB which isn't exactly high-spec, but it did pretty well for the kind of effects I was able to get done in time for the show. All the displays (a couple circular oscilloscopes, a standard scope, some colliding sine-wave stuff, etc.) are generated in realtime with a single Atmel XMega16A4 using about ~7K of flash. (Probably half that is just sine tables!)

The software and hardware was built in a day, but it ran pretty well. Chiptune music works really well with the oscilloscope displays since you have lots of pure tones with relatively simple waveforms.

The scanners in the laser are quite slow, so they tend to smooth out the waveforms significantly. Supposedly the scanners are 20Kpps, but I'm thinking more like half that.




Anyway, it worked well and everyone seemed to enjoy having something to stare at while listening to the tunes.

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