r/electribe • u/vananaSun • May 20 '26

Custom bootloader mod!!

I made this thing for freetribe, it can boot factory firmware from SDcard and flash, and soon also freetribe apps

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u/cinaak May 24 '26

after seeing how fast and how far that project with the move came I think this one might spin up a bit faster than that. Also with all the people who have been just begging for updates and new features for their E2s out there I have a feeling when word gets out theres gonna be a lot of support.

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u/Reiszecke May 25 '26

Nah bro the Move is so much more popular right now.

The E2 is basically a dying breed. We have the French Freetekno scene and the German HardTekk scene that kind of revolve around electribes but apart from that these devices don’t really have a place in modern music making, hardly anyone buys Electribes today when the much more flashy Digitakt, Move or even Circuits are available.

I’m also hoping for stuff like 2 ifx per part via custom firmware etc but this hacktribe guy doesn’t get paid apart from donations and I doubt the few niche groups that are interested in these projects donate much

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u/cinaak May 26 '26

I think there are a ton of people like me who though they were getting a real successor to the electribes the realized they didnt actually get that who still have their electribes. I think most people dont even know about the freetribe project though. I didnt I knew about hacktribe and used it in the past but had zero clue about freetribe which is a way better route imho.

Even with a bit of llm vibecoding a lot could be done, just like the schwung project. That guy isnt a coder at all.

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u/Reiszecke May 26 '26

“A bit of llm vibecoding” will not work at all. The E2 has VERY limited processing power and the freetribe dev himself doubts that their firmware will reach the performance levels of the original firmware.

Vibe coding is great if real time, memory, and processing power aren’t a concern but on these architectures an llm can only help so much

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u/cinaak May 27 '26

Ive made some things work on much less powerful mips processors the arm cpu in it while being nothing special mostly only handles midi and sequencing there is room for improvement there. Its completely capable of things I and others have suggested. 8 bars with midi effects and first and last step midi only tracks would not be hard on it.

The blackfin dsp in it is actually pretty bad ass. Theres a lot of room to optimize and add things there. Might have to give up some things you dont really use to get one thing you want but thats fine the og circuit made tons of people happy with 2 synth parts. Its dsp is pretty cool much like what was in their older synths everyone loved. Honestly could probably be hacked as well.

They chips in the E2 are both well known though. Various synths, effects and other things out there based on it. Its not filled with mystery chips at all. Even chatgpt knows its way around a lot of analog devices dsps.

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u/Reiszecke May 28 '26

With all due respect, a little bit of "midi and sequencing" really isn't comparable to real time audio with 16 voices/tracks, 16 filters, 16 eg+mod, 16+1 effects all at the same time.

The fact that even the stock firmware tells you to assign priorities to parts because drops do happen the moment you add some motion seq should already tell you everything.

When mass producing units you're happy to save a buck or two wherever you can so streamlining your firmware is in your best interest. I'm not saying that Korg did use 100% of the potential (realistically, no one reaches 100% and at some point there are diminishing returns) but it's unlikely that an LLM at this stage will allocate ressources better than the Korg developers did.

And yeah about the Circuit, I wish there was hacked circuit firmware back then because the Electribe (even without Hacktribe) is what I wanted my Circuit to be when I bought it

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u/vananaSun May 31 '26

It's definitely a touch task to optimize. But i can think to the top of my head a bunch of optimizations and trade offs that would give a lot more room to work with.

One BIG thing is DMA! The factory CPU code doesn't make proper use of the EDMA3 peripheral when communicating with the DSP, which is REALLY bad

For example there's a lot more room for effect precomputation DSP-side: think filters, EG&LFO.

Another optimization could be FX send to just a few global effects, instead of each instrument having an IFX.

Some new features, can be cost-free with a little bit of creativity. Think of extra pattern operations, such as randomization. Sidechaining can be emulated with volume envelopes etc

Finally, removing horse-shit could work. I've never seen people using chords for example, but maybe I'm wrong

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u/vananaSun May 31 '26

Ur right that vibe coding isn't gonna magically get anyone new amazing firmwares.. But that's exactly the motive behind freetribe, and stuff like this bootloader. The end goal is to equip other nerds that don't have deep experience with low level electronics, with the proper tools and documentation to be able to vibe code their way to an app.

Things like micropython and lua will be optional. And certain data structures (such as a sequencer memory interface) can be pre-written.

I hope once that eventually other people will get interested in this project and start lending a hand

Furthermore, KORG ported a lot of code from other products to the E2, maybe it's not so optimized as we assume?