Five days ago we wrote about what happens when a manufacturer’s hardware becomes a platform it never designed — the M-VAVE FM-1’s 107 unofficial repositories, Rockbox, OpenWrt, and the handful of instrument makers who had already picked a position on how much of that they were willing to admit to.
In the time since, four more moves landed. This is the quick version: who did what, what licence it carries, and what you can actually build on it today.
The list
| Vendor | Device | What opened | Licence | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Erica Synths | LXR V2 (Eurorack module) | Full firmware source | GPL-3.0 | Shipping now |
| Behringer | IGNITE (hardware sequencer) | Full application, audio engine, hardware protocol | AGPL-3.0 | Source only — no product yet |
| Behringer | SP1200X (SP-1200 clone) | Promised, not yet published | Unconfirmed | Teaser only |
| Akai | MPC Sample Key | Unclear — Akai hasn’t said | Unconfirmed | Teaser only |
Two of those four are real code you can clone right now. Two are still just words from a marketing account. Worth being honest about which is which, because that distinction is the whole story.
Erica Synths did it again, quietly
We covered Erica Synths putting the LXR-02 desktop drum synth’s firmware under GPL-3.0 on 23 October. Five days later, on 28 October, a second repository appeared in the same GitHub organisation: erica-synths/lxr-eurorack-app, firmware for the LXR V2 Eurorack module — the same drum engine in a Eurorack-format version, built for an STM32F765 running the drum voices, effects bus, MIDI and the module’s own screen and encoder.
Same licence, GPL-3.0. Same undo pattern as the desktop release: the bootloader that handles updates is never touched by an update itself, so a failed flash just means you try again, not a dead module. The README is blunt about the limits, too — “Erica Synths provides no support for self-built or modified firmware,” and the company’s name and the LXR name stay trademarked, same split every vendor in this story has landed on: the code is yours, the brand is not.
It is a small release — 13 stars a day after launch, nothing like the FM-1 scene’s numbers — but it means Erica Synths now has three public firmware repositories for one product line in under a week. That is a company treating “publish the source” as a standing practice, not a one-time announcement.
Behringer’s second release in three days
Three days after opening the KICK’s source code, Music Tribe did it again, bigger. IGNITE, a 64-channel hardware sequencer, went up on GitHub under AGPL-3.0 on 29 October — and this time there is no product to buy at all. No price, no release date. Just a touchscreen sequencer with 16 RGB step pads, 8 CV/Gate outs and a General MIDI engine, as source code, built on the same JUCE framework that made the AGPL the practical choice for the KICK too.
Then, the next morning, 30 October, Behringer teased something smaller and much cheaper: the SP1200X, a $200 homage to the E-mu SP-1200 — the hybrid sampler that defined the sound of golden-age hip-hop — with the company’s own announcement promising “we’re making it open source.” There is no repository yet. Treat that one the way Synth Anatomy does: a commitment in principle, not a thing you can clone.
Two releases from the same company in three days is a cadence, not a coincidence.
Akai’s answer is still just a tease
Behringer’s KICK release in mid-October drew a public reaction from Akai within a day: a teaser for something called the MPC Sample Key, a keyboard companion to the existing MPC Sample sampler. Coverage has framed it as Akai “answering” Behringer, and some outlets have reported it as an open-firmware move.
We could not confirm that from Akai itself. MusicRadar, covering the same teaser, says plainly that Akai “hasn’t yet clarified whether the source code for Sample Key’s stock firmware will be published” — and there is still no confirmed price, release date, or spec sheet. We’re listing it here because it is clearly part of the same moment, not because there is anything to build on yet. If that changes, we’ll cover the actual release the way we covered IGNITE’s.
What this adds to the pattern
Our original piece identified three things that have to be true for hardware to become a platform: it has to be a general-purpose computer, it needs an update channel, and somebody has to document the way in. Vendor-published firmware skips straight past all three — the manufacturer already has the documentation, because they wrote the firmware.
That is the quiet value of what Erica Synths and Behringer are doing differently from M-VAVE and Elektron’s situations: there is no reverse-engineering phase. A GPL-3.0 or AGPL-3.0 repository from the vendor hands a community the finished map on day one. Whether anyone actually builds on IGNITE or the LXR V2 the way hundreds of developers built on the FM-1 is still an open question — neither has the forks yet to say so either way. But the barrier that used to take months is now just a git clone.
Sources
- erica-synths/lxr-eurorack-app — GitHub
- erica-synths/lxr-desktop-app — GitHub
- MusicTribeOpenSource/0716-AAF — Behringer IGNITE source repository
- Behringer IGNITE is an Open-Source Hardware Sequencer — Gearnews
- Behringer SP1200X: a $200 open-source clone of the E-mu SP-1200 drum machine — Synth Anatomy
- Akai kicks back? Sample Key teaser lands a day after Behringer’s open-source Kick — MusicRadar
Related Reading
The firmware-communities series
- Part I: Hardware as platforms, and the rise of firmware communities
- Part III: People are turning their smart TVs dumb again, and AI is doing the work
This week’s releases, in full
- Behringer open-sourced the KICK’s complete source code under the AGPL
- Behringer open-sourced IGNITE, a flagship sequencer, before shipping any firmware
- Behringer teases a $200 open-source SP-1200 clone
- Erica Synths put the LXR-02’s firmware under GPL-3.0
The rest of the scene