Hardware as Platforms, and the Rise of Firmware Communities

Updated 30 October 2026: this is Part I of a series. Part II covers four more vendor moves since this piece ran — Erica Synths, Behringer twice over and Akai’s non-committal teaser. Part III covers a related but distinct trend: people using AI coding assistants to debloat their smart TVs over ADB.

On 2 October 2026, a GitHub user called hugelton published a repository named Felucca: “Custom firmware for M-VAVE FM-1”. As of this morning it has 589 stars and 144 forks, and it was last pushed to today.

Twenty-four days.

In that time the M-VAVE FM-1 — a roughly $75 pocket FM synth running a JieLi AC791N Bluetooth audio chip, which we first covered in August as the DX7 sound for the price of a nice dinner — has acquired a groovebox, two drum machines, an Omnichord, a kalimba, a Minimoog tribute, a General MIDI module, a dub machine, a chord harp, a QY70-style arranger, a browser emulator, an Android host, a VST, a firmware patcher and a 64-step generative sequencer. A GitHub search for fm1 m-vave returns 107 repositories.

That is a platform. Nobody at M-VAVE designed one.

None of this is new. It is one of the oldest patterns in consumer electronics. What is new is the speed.

The scene, this morning

As of this morning, by GitHub’s own numbers:

Repository	What it is	★	Forks	Licence
`isod89/sloop-fm1`	Live groovebox	641	91	GPL-3.0
`hugelton/Felucca`	The base most others fork	589	144	GPL-3.0
`aroum/fm1-custom-fw`	Resource hub, docs, SysEx tools	271	—	none
`m-vave/fm1_open`	The manufacturer’s own SDK	233	41	NOASSERTION
`charlesvestal/fm1-x0x`	909, 808, two 303s, breakbeats	202	—	GPL-3.0
`joakimeriksson/fm1-emu`	Browser + native emulator	104	—	MIT
`charlesvestal/fm1-amb`	Generative ambient, Music for Airports	96	—	MPL-2.0
`illuminus5/skiff`	Six-track groovebox, 14 engines	94	9	GPL-3.0
`charlesvestal/fm1-fomni`	Omnichord-style chord harp	70	—	GPL-3.0
`benny-sparra/fm1-dx7-patch-importer`	Editor and librarian	62	—	MIT
`isod89/clipper-fm1`	Experimental synth, from Sloop	58	—	GPL-3.0
`zvenson/dinghy`	Minimal base to build your own on	41	—	GPL-3.0
`zednaked/jangada`	Superwave, mod matrix, drones	34	4	GPL-3.0
`sbegueria/fm1-dub`	Dub machine	27	—	GPL-3.0
`markterm/harbor`	Runs FM-1 firmwares on Android	21	—	none

The manufacturer’s official SDK is only the fourth most popular FM-1 repository. m-vave/fm1_open has 233 stars against Felucca’s 589 and Sloop’s 641. The community’s substrate is 2.5 times more starred than the vendor’s. And fm1_open was last pushed on 21 October, while Felucca, Sloop, Skiff, the emulator and four more community repositories were all pushed today. The official platform is five days stale; the unofficial one is live.

Twenty-two repositories reference Felucca. charlesvestal/fm1-x0x is “a fork of Felucca”. isod89/clipper-fm1 is “from SLOOP, based on Felucca”. math0ne/fm1-chord is “built on Felucca”. charlesvestal/fm1-base is “an MPL-2.0 base and template … on felucca-bsp”. There is a fm1-felucca-editor, a fm1-pulses-felucca, a FM1VST described as a “VST for Felucca base FM-1 Firmware”, and a sloop-fm1-sim “based on Sloop and Felucca”.

A community wrote its own board support package for someone else’s product, and then built an ecosystem on that instead of on the manufacturer’s.

The firmwares also have a house style. Felucca. Dinghy. Sloop. Clipper. Skiff. Jangada. Harbor. Somebody started naming them after boats and everyone else went along with it.

It happened to an MP3 player first

In December 2001 a mailing list was set up — the first message went out on 7 December — aimed at improving the firmware of the Archos Jukebox, a hard-disk MP3 player. Wikipedia’s description of why is unusually blunt: the Jukebox is “historically notable for shipping with a user interface and operating system so unfriendly and bug-ridden as to inspire Björn Stenberg and other programmers to develop a superior, free and open-source replacement operating system.”

That project became Rockbox, and it outlived the hardware it was written for. The team ported it to iRiver’s H-series and then to Apple’s iPod line, and the project is still receiving commits today. Twenty-five years.

Nobody rewrites firmware that works. A firmware community is, more often than not, a verdict on the vendor’s software.

A router became a platform by accident

In June 2003, people on the Linux kernel mailing list noticed that the firmware of the Linksys WRT54G wireless router was built on Linux. Linux is under the GPL. That meant Linksys was obliged to publish the source of its modified version, and in July 2003 — Slashdot reported it on the 6th — it did.

The first release was incomplete. The Software Freedom Conservancy describes it as an “almost-GPL-compliant” source release, and says enforcement pressure produced a fuller one by early 2004. Harald Welte’s separate gpl-violations.org work sued a string of wireless-router companies in Germany over the same period, producing further source releases.

What grew out of that partial, reluctant, legally compelled publication was OpenWrt, which began in January 2004, based on the Linksys GPL sources plus a uClibc buildroot. Later versions threw nearly all of the Linksys code away. The same release seeded DD-WRT, HyperWRT and, through HyperWRT, Tomato.

Linksys did not choose any of this. A licence obligation turned its router into a platform, and the platform outlived every commercial decision the company made about it.

Cameras, printers, keyboards, drones

The same thing has happened in every category where hardware runs updatable code.

Canon compact cameras. A programmer working as VitalyB reverse-engineered the PowerShot firmware and, per IEEE Spectrum, “In 2007, he made public the fruits of his labor”: the Canon Hack Development Kit, adding RAW capture, live histograms, UBASIC and Lua scripting, motion-triggered shutters and intervalometers to cameras Canon sold without them. Crucially, CHDK runs from the memory card and never alters Canon’s own firmware — take the card out and the camera is stock.
3D printers. Marlin, created August 2011, now 17,636 stars and 19,719 forks.
Keyboards. QMK, created December 2014, now 20,782 stars and 44,386 forks.
Drones. Betaflight, created June 2015, now 11,703 stars and 4,117 forks.

A star is approval. A fork is use — in a firmware community you fork because your device needs its own configuration, your own keymap, your own printer geometry.

Project	Forks per star	What that means
QMK	2.14	Everyone who uses it forks it. Twice.
Marlin	1.12	Every printer is its own build.
`SonicPotions/LXR`	0.44	A decade-old DIY drum machine.
Betaflight	0.35	Configured more than forked.
Synthstrom Deluge	0.28	Vendor-sanctioned, community-contributed.
`hugelton/Felucca`	0.24	A base, three weeks old.
`m-vave/fm1_open`	0.18	The official SDK.
`isod89/sloop-fm1`	0.14	A destination firmware, not a base.
`illuminus5/skiff`	0.10	New.

The FM-1 scene sits at the bottom of that range: still mostly watched rather than built on. QMK at 2.14 forks per star is an eleven-year-old community in which forking is the normal way to use the thing. Felucca at 0.24 after three weeks is a scene whose builders are a small fraction of its audience — which is where QMK, Marlin and Betaflight all began.

Music hardware got here late, and is now getting here all at once

Instrument makers held out longer than routers and printers, and 2026 has been the year the dam broke. Five different answers to the same question, all of them documented, all within thirteen months:

Open from the start. Mutable Instruments published hardware and firmware for years as a matter of policy. Émilie Gillet left Eurorack in December 2022 and, on 12 October 2026, put Beads — the one module she had kept closed — on GitHub under MIT, hardware design and firmware alike.

Sanction a fork. Synthstrom Audible open-sourced the Deluge firmware on 5 June 2023 under GPL-3.0, and did something structurally clever with it: the company keeps an “Official” repository, the community maintains a fork, and features that prove popular in the fork are considered for promotion upstream. Community firmware 1.0 shipped in December 2023 — and included a Norns layout, using the midigrid script, so a Deluge could pretend to be a Monome. SynthstromAudible/DelugeFirmware now has 688 stars and 194 forks and was pushed to today.

Publish outright, mid-product-life. Erica Synths released the LXR-02’s firmware under GPL-3.0 on 23 October — a drum machine it is still selling — along with the bootloader, so you can install what you build. erica-synths/lxr-desktop-app is GPL-3.0 with 94 stars; the bootloader has 8. Worth noting what that release is descended from: SonicPotions/LXR, created 30 March 2013, carries no LICENSE file at all. The new release is cleaner than the open-source project it came from.

Publish after the community has already done it. M-VAVE’s FM1 Open landed on 13 October, days after the first community firmwares — a GPLv3 app layer with an SDK linking exception, a binary synthesis engine, a browser workbench, and a “Revert to factory V15” button. We covered the whole sequence at the time, and the choice of a linking exception is the pragmatic middle: the community can fork everything that makes a firmware distinctive without the vendor opening an engine it treats as the product.

Suppress it — on your own property only. On 16 September 2026 Elektron stopped hacks and firmware modifications being shared on Elektronauts, its official forum, citing a surge of custom firmware, much of it apparently AI-assisted, and the risk of untested builds bricking hardware. The policy banned posting files on Elektron’s property, not modifying your own device. By 3 October there was a dedicated forum elsewhere hosting Monomachine alternative firmware, Octatrack multi-track USB audio mods and the FM-1’s firmwares too. On 17 October the company spent an hour on the phone with a YouTuber about it, explicitly not as a statement.

Those five are not five opinions. They are five positions on one axis: how much of the platform you already have do you intend to admit to.

Why it is happening faster

Hardware becomes a platform when three things are true, and all three are now true by default.

It has to be a general-purpose computer. The FM-1’s synthesis runs on a Bluetooth audio SoC. Nothing about that chip is instrument-specific. The same is true of a router’s MIPS core, a printer’s ARM, a keyboard’s microcontroller.

It has to have an update channel. A firmware updater is a loaded gun pointed at your own product strategy. It exists so you can fix bugs; it works just as well for code you did not write. Every vendor ships one because the alternative — hardware that can never be fixed — is worse.

Somebody has to document the way in. This used to take years. Rockbox needed volunteers to reverse-engineer a disk-based player over months. CHDK needed somebody to study a disassembly of a firmware updater. The FM-1 needed zvenson/dinghy — “the smallest firmware to build your own on: the plumbing done and documented” — and hugelton/Felucca, and then anyone who could write C had a route in.

And then there is the accelerant Elektron named out loud: AI assistance. We have written about what that is doing to the audio plugin market, and the mechanism is the same here. The barrier to a firmware for an undocumented SoC used to be expertise. With a documented base and a model that can read C, it is time. Twenty-two repositories built on Felucca in three weeks is what that looks like, and so is an “untested builds bricking devices” policy.

The button matters more than the SDK

Of everything M-VAVE shipped, the most consequential piece is not the source code. It is the line in the browser workbench that reads “Revert to factory V15”, and the force-flash mode sitting behind an explicit warning that it “may clear data, cause a failure to boot, and require dedicated tools to recover”.

CHDK got to the same place twenty years earlier by a different route: because it boots from the memory card and leaves Canon’s firmware untouched, the undo is physical — you remove the card. M-VAVE cannot do that, because an FM-1 firmware really is flashed, so it shipped the software equivalent instead.

A manufacturer-provided undo button for third-party firmware resolves the actual objection. Elektron’s stated concern — bricked devices, support load, users who flashed something and cannot get back — is legitimate. It is also entirely solvable by the vendor and by nobody else, because only the vendor can credibly put a restore path next to a flash button and ship the factory image behind it.

Every manufacturer that hits this will choose between policing the community and giving it a safety net. The second is cheaper, and the FM-1 is the proof of concept.

The paperwork is behind the platform, as usual

The licences across the FM-1 scene run GPL-3.0, MIT, MPL-2.0, Apache-2.0, Unlicense, NOASSERTION — and none at all.

aroum/fm1-custom-fw is the second most-starred repository in the scene, at 271 stars, and it is the resource hub: the firmware directory, the documentation, the SysEx protocol tools. It has no licence. So does markterm/harbor, the Android host. An unlicensed repository is not permissive — by default nothing is granted, which means the scene’s own directory and its mobile runtime are, strictly, not reusable.

The same gap is everywhere this month. NVIDIA shipped 2,575 CC BY 4.0 assets this month and declared the licence nowhere a platform could read it. Gradium labelled a model family Apache-2.0 when one of seven models was. Deki Engine got 35 of 37 repositories right and left the demo unlicensed. A platform forms faster than its paperwork, every time, and the paperwork is what decides whether any of it can be built on commercially.

If you are publishing an FM-1 firmware this week: add a LICENSE file. It is the cheapest contribution available to you.

What to watch

Whether Felucca stays the base. A community substrate that outruns the vendor’s SDK is an unstable arrangement. Either M-VAVE absorbs it, or fm1_open becomes the thing people build adapters for.

Whether the fork ratio climbs. At 0.24 forks per star, the FM-1 scene is young. If it is still there in a year it will look more like Marlin and less like a release announcement.

Whether the port to other hardware holds. Somebody is already migrating FM-1 firmwares to M-VAVE’s SMK-37. The moment a firmware community spans two products, the platform is the community’s, not the manufacturer’s.

Whether anyone copies the restore button. It costs a vendor almost nothing and solves the objection every other manufacturer has raised.

Sources

The rest of this series

The FM-1 story so far

The Elektron saga

Manufacturers opening up

Unofficial firmware in the wild

Licensing, which is always the unfinished part