Freetribe is a free, open-source firmware for Electribe 2, built from the ground up using original code and open-source projects. Freetribe aims to provide a user-friendly API for connecting control input to audio processing.
See Getting Started to jump right into the Freetribe API, or Architecture for a deeper look at the system.
From a user application perspective, Freetribe is currently light on features. Most of the hardware initialisation is complete, with driver stacks for much of the system. Built on this is a set of services providing a high-level interface to the device. Some basic examples are provided, showing how to integrate user application code with the Freetribe kernel.
- Serial MIDI input and output via TRS port.
- Set or clear a pixel anywhere in the vast 128x64 dot-matrix.
- Control backlight RGB (binary).
- Register callbacks for all of the panel controls.
- Set and toggle LEDs, with brightness control for those with support.
- Send commands to the Blackfin DSP and receive feedback.
- Process audio based on control input.
- Audio module API similar to many plugin formats.
Some of these are in progress, most should be possible.
- High speed DSP control via EMIFA/HostDMA.
- DMA support for peripheral drivers.
- USB driver.
- SD card driver.
- DSP block processing.
- Memory protection.
- Dynamic loading of apps and modules.
- Preemptive scheduling using FreeRTOS.
- Embedded Lua and MicroPython.
- Support for sync ports.
If you need help with this project, please visit the Freetribe discussion forum.
Freetribe is free (as in GPL) and always will be. If you would like to support my work you are most welcome to become a sponsor. Freetribe exists because people sponsored Hacktribe. Your support helps keep me motivated, fuelled and focussed.
Freetribe would be almost impossible without other open-source projects. The CPU drivers are based on StarterWare by Texas Instruments. The hardware abstraction, build environment and code examples provided the stepping-stone needed to get started.
In much the same way, the DSP drivers are based on monome/aleph. This showed how to initialise the Blackfin processor and configure peripherals. They also provide a public domain DSP library, with many of the difficult maths problems packaged into convenient unit generators.
MIDI input parsing is based on mikromodular/libmidi, with sysex/binary conversion borrowed from the Arduino MIDI library by Francois Best.
UGUI and micromenu provide a graphical interface for user applications.
Special thanks to countless stackoverflow users.
AGPL-3.0.
