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Comment by vegadw | Hacker News Reader

For those that haven't been following along, a TON of custom firmwares have shown up for the M-VAVE FM-1, a roughly ~$70 synth.

BaudGirl's VA is probably the biggest right now: https://baudgirl.com/work/FM-1+VA

But there's also https://github.com/hugelton/Felucca, https://github.com/charlesvestal/fm1-x0x, https://www.groove-os.com, https://isod89.github.io/sloop-fm1/webapp/installer/, and https://github.com/charlesvestal/fm1-fomni

AFAIK, all of them are vibecoded, but that doesn't mean they're not super fun.

Edit: Someone made a good firmware list: https://fm1-editor.com/firmware/

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My partner has been playing with one and its truly incredible, the sequencer interfaces and enhancements make it go from a toy to an incredibly powerful machine. The felucca project has a web interface and you can try out the software on its own without the hardware: https://hugelton.github.io/Felucca/webapp/try/

They are SO FUN, seriously. Best $180 I spent (because I bought THREE M-VAVE's!!)! ..

But, it also has to be pointed out to the HN hoipolloi: these firmwares run in web-based emulators too!!!!

So you don't have to blow $60 to join this music tech revolution ..

I wonder what specifically allowed this. Is it some new LLM innovation that can do reverse engineering now?

M-Vave didn't release any source code.

There is a publicly available Devkit[1] for the processor used by M-VAVE in all of their products:

https://doc.zh-jieli.com/AC79/zh-cn/release_v1.0.3/board_des...

.. and .. as all of their products are extremely good value for money .. I dare say some budding hacker saw an opportunity and went with it:

https://github.com/aroum/fm1-custom-fw

This has opened the flood gates for great new stuff to be written for it, and oh what a ride it has been these past few weeks! Simply the hottest toy in music-tech, bar none!

There's a devkit for all of Korg's stuff too.

There sure is, and folks are doing some crazy things with it ..

For example: the Bent[1] and Turbo[2] synths from Sinevibes[3] are incredible.

A perfect example of how the platform was embraced by user-developers and pushed into extremely creative and inspiring territory .. surely other manufacturers will start to take note, and maybe someone, some day, will start shipping their instruments with compilers-onboard, to .. you know .. make it easier for kids to keep the bending going on ..

[1] - https://www.sinevibes.com/korgbent/

[2] - https://www.sinevibes.com/korgturbo/

[3] - https://www.sinevibes.com/korg/

I did some bits with gen-1 logue-sdk, the NTS-1 could have been a platform like the OP but the processor is severely underpowered for the price in today's standard and discontinued shortly after.

Oh, nice .. yeah the NTS-1 was a bit of a victim of its Bill of Materials, in my opinion - a lesson learned by the Monome and Zynthian communities, meanwhile.

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