Chameleon AVR/PIC Development Kit

The Chameleon systems are Arduino style development boards created by Nurve Networks. Each board contains a Propeller based microcontroller, to control and simplify I/O functions for input and video, and either a 16-bit Microchip Pic24 or an 8 AVR micro controller. The idea behind the Chameleon systems is to expand the idea of the Arduino boards by giving the user easy access to video, sound, and keyboard or mouse for input. This media processer is utilized by sending simple commands to the microprocessor and simplifying the entire I/O process.

Nurve Networks wanted a simple application to include in the firmware to show off the basic functions and to give the user something to play with when they first power up their board. They also needed the application relatively quick, where I had a window of less than two weeks. To simplify things, I also wanted to make the same program run on both the AVR and PIC24 platform and make only small revisions that would apply only to that particular microcontroller.

Below are the programs that I created for the two Chameleon systems. The final product at the online at Nurve Networks.

Crate-It
I decided to port over the classic crate pushing puzzle game by Hiroyuki Imabayashi. The turn based nature worked well in the limited bandwidth that is available between the Propeller MCU and AVR or PIC16. For the amount of time I was provided, I am happy with the result. The game comes pre-installed on both systems, uses the keyboard for controls, and even has sound.

Tile Editor
I also created a quick tile editing program since the graphics driver supports four color tiles. It is a Win32 app that will display the palette color values and tile pixel values in hex, and update them in real-time.

	Crate-It I decided to port over the classic crate pushing puzzle game by Hiroyuki Imabayashi. The turn based nature worked well in the limited bandwidth that is available between the Propeller MCU and AVR or PIC16. For the amount of time I was provided, I am happy with the result. The game comes pre-installed on both systems, uses the keyboard for controls, and even has sound.
	Tile Editor I also created a quick tile editing program since the graphics driver supports four color tiles. It is a Win32 app that will display the palette color values and tile pixel values in hex, and update them in real-time.