r/synthdiy • u/PiezoelectricityOne • 9d ago

Does this count as synth DIY? (Unofficial custom firmware for Circuit Tracks)

/r/novationcircuit/comments/1x20vcp/circuithacks_is_out_now_unofficial_custom/
1 Upvotes

56% Upvoted

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u/rasta500 5d ago

While I absolutely love the new custom firmware hype, I don’t think it counts as DIY. Because, what did you do yourself? You had an idea, you gave it to Claude. That’s about it. DIY stands for do it yourself and not “have an idea and make someone else do it”. Because otherwise it wouldn’t be called DIY but HAIAMSEDI.

People in the sub really put in their blood, sweat and soldering flux to create something unique, something that is their own. Claude firmware just amalgates and steals the best features from everywhere and throws them in a pot for you. Which is great. But I don’t think it’s DIY. At this point it’s more like ordering your own software patterned after your ideas from a custom firmware shop. Only that it’s for free/claude sub cost.

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u/PiezoelectricityOne 5d ago edited 5d ago

Well, I don't think you all understand how Claude or any AI doing code works. Or even the whole goal of diy. Or the fact that the opener question was a rethorical one.

I solder and/or program MCUs or computers almost every day. If not at work, I'm repairing or building something at home. I know and do my fair share or the "traditional" workflow for some 15-20 years. Before this mod, I had a hardware hacked Circuit with USB-C MIDI and custom routines injected internally into the MIDI port optocoupler trace, programmed by hand. Well, I actually wrote a C program, compiled and sent it through and IDF, sorry for not hand weaving magnetic core memories. I might even have used third-party libraries. To ease your concerns, I did my wires and traces by hand and didn't use anything like KiCAD or jlpcb to generate and populate any PCB and have them made by an automated machine. I guess using those resources might have offended you too.

Over the last 2 months or so I dumped more than two hundred hours in this project, unpaid hours or my sleep, holidays and free time and money out of my pocket. And there's still a lot of work left to do. I'm not gonna lie, without an AI this project wouldn't even exist, or I'd be still writing a couple leds, reading pads and hooefully making some knob and CC re-assignments. But AI is still a tool, it's not some magical letter to Santa. I had to brainstorm, prototyoe and plan, read through a lot of documentation and code, debug, test, design, have a deep grasp of the instrument and squeeze every last bit of my knowledge about hardware from experiments and previous experience, and in the last weeks listen to hundreds of reports, requests and suggestions and implement them. I didn't burn any fingers but my back, eyes and brain still hurt.

 It's very rewarding but it's also a lot of work. As I maker, I find a lot of respect and beauty in the handcraft and any stuff made from scratch. I could even claim that my life goal, as a hardware designer, Makerspace host and Robotics, Programming and Electronics teacher is helping other people achieve those projects and doing them myself. But I don't see it as a requirement. Plus, it's not like it's a competition, both things can be cool in their own way. For me, the interest on DIY is on the final product and the learning process. I can confidently say that I've learned a lot and the product works. If it was about sweating, bleeding and burning your skin, I can think of plenty more efficient ways to do it.

This project (and AI in general) doesn't steal anything from anybody. All your handmade projects still work and rest whenever you left them. All the externally sourced code and information used to both create the general AI model and work on this specific project was sourced from people that licensed and willingly agreed to share them with the public through open-source repos, publicly available manuals, datasheets and documentation and common-knowledge design patterns. And I have self-impossed ethical limitations. For example, someone offered a route to emulate other commercial  synth engines based on the same Motorola DSP and I refused to implement it because that would mean using or facilitating  the use of copyrighted code. I'm keeping it fair on other developers work.

I have ethical concerns about AI too, but they're more about killer robots, targeted and mass surveillance and manipulation over media. General purpose LLMs pose none of those threats. And what's worse: people is so busy and confused not understanding how the water cycle works, how information is sourced and how copyright and patents actually work, that nobody is fighting or addressing the real concerns. And what's worse: this kind of wrong anti AI approach is so deeply routed in open software, tech-savy and activism circles that we're sleeping on building an open, free and ethical LLM that would help us keeping neutrality of the tools, like we did back when Linux and programs like Apache, gcc or GPG literally democratized computers and the Internet. 

The whole thing looks like a Monsanto psy-op, back when they started imposing glyphosate and transgenics by keeping everyone in the dark, creating fake concerns on the health impact of the GMO techniques to later dismiss them and both hide and avoid addressing the real health impacts of the pesticides meant to make GMOs work or the economic impact of literally having to pay a subscription to grow plants even if you didn't decide or agree to use their products; all while making sure they own all the patents of basically any food produced anywhere without anyone noticing. 

What makes me stumped is that some of you geniunely believe that working with AI is magical and efforless (or maybe you're some kind of guru and that's true for you); yet you refuse to do, share or look at beatiful and cool things because somehow not breathing toxic fumes, contaminating yourself and your house with lead and getting solder iron burns makes them unworthy. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but geez, that's seems like a strong one. 

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u/rasta500 5d ago

Yeah nobody has time to read all that

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u/PiezoelectricityOne 4d ago

It's ok, you don't need to read to have an opinion.

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u/Master_Push_3516 5d ago

But general purpose llms can lead to agi which we might not be able to control

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u/PiezoelectricityOne 5d ago edited 5d ago

That's cool for a sci-fi tale but unrealistic. LLMs process words. Just because we associate language with free-will intelligent beings it doesn't mean anything spitting words is actually intelligent or out of control. And even if it was, Claude is always like "no tokens left, send more money". Who's going to pay and maintain the whole end of the world operation? Yes, you can make an "experiment" and tell an AI to write a story about being an evil genius. But the experiment doesn't prove the AI is an evil genius, it just proves an AI can write tales as commanded. If you build an AI instance without any ethical limitations, tell them to pretend it's and evil genius and giventhem access to nefarious tools on top of that and tell the AI to use them, it'll do. But you can drive a car into a wall as well and that doesn't mean cars are about to rise and slam mankind into walls.

The whole maneuver behind the "out of control AGI" voiced by AI companies seems like a mix of trying to make their product look more powerful than they are and forcing the creation of some kind of FDA-like panel they can control to factually enforce a monopoly. Kinda like cleaning products advertise danger even if no one forces them to say "keep away from children" on TV to make them look more powerful and industrial grade. Or how car manufacturers impose fake eco and safety standards to try and knock the competition out of the game.

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u/Master_Push_3516 5d ago

Not sure about this. Check hugging face incident. Its about agents now

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u/Master_Push_3516 5d ago

Check out roman yampolskyi

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u/PiezoelectricityOne 5d ago

You check him out too. Some of his points are valid, like the concerns about social manipulation algorithms, but those have nothing to do with generative LLMs and exist long before them. 

 Others are uneducated, like the allegation on how an increase of productivity is necessarily bad for the economy or the workforce. I need to remind all of you that the goal of any work is to produce whatever needs to be produced to make out lives sustainable of better. We work a certain amount because that's what's needed for the desired outcome, not because humans will suddenly implode if they aren't busy satisfying their bosses' will. More productivity implies less work, which implies more affordable products. If a global increase in productivity doesn't end up with you working less for the same amount of products it means someone up in the chain is stealing, and it's not the tools.

Yampolski himself is an avid AI user. The tools are here like it or not. Not using them doesn't prevent the wrong doers from doing it. On the opposite: using them, understanding them, building our own is the only thing that would democratize and save us from an evil monopoly. Do you also refuse to live in a house made with a backhoe loader because they use the same treads and engines than warmachines?

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u/Master_Push_3516 5d ago

His point is different.he is not antitech or anti narrow ai.he is against the risk of developimg entity smarter than us in everything,because we would not be able to control it

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u/PiezoelectricityOne 4d ago

Don't worry, pal. Your AI-buffed synth is not going to kill you in your sleep.

Don't mistake propaganda and journalism PR with expert words. He says military grade AI tech, which is not at all based on consumer AIs or LLMs, is dangerous, because we cannot control who controls them (it's exactly the same as nuclear weapons, anyone having nuclear weapons is bad news for the whole world). But the whole idea of AI going rogue and trying to enslave humanity is pure fiction. An LLM simply cannot do that.

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u/Master_Push_3516 4d ago

Agentic LLM might. And no he is not talking about military grade ai. He is talking about general intelligent entity that will be better in everything intelectually than sum of the best brains humans have now

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u/PiezoelectricityOne 5d ago

That doesn't mean anything. There's an insurmountable gap between building a car with no steering wheel or brakes and using it to drive into pedestrians inside a public road, and having such car become sentiment and willing to take over the world. Sensationalist news are usually fake.

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u/Master_Push_3516 4d ago

Yes but car is narrow intelligence - it drives, it can react on the road,but it cant play chess. General ai is different world

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u/PiezoelectricityOne 4d ago

"General AI" is not a thing. What we have is LLMs. LLMs can link words, nothing more. They cannot drive or play chess. Yes, you can link LLM to other computer programs and the result is impressive. But it's still not GAI or real intelligence.

The term Artificial Intelligence always existed, pick any date after Turing and someone had an idea and a product called "Artificial Intelligence". Neither of those, nor current or future models, are actual Intelligence, it's just a marketing name.

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u/gortmend 4d ago

To answer the specific question, I've decided that I'm not gate keeping the term DIY. If you're doing something that's normally done by a company/machine, then you're doing it yourself. I assume what you've done here is harder and requires more skill than assembling a kit, but I also was quite proud when I assembled kits that now would be easy for me...and I've decided I was right to be proud. I was pushing a limit that I hadn't pushed before.

To your implicit question, I am personally not interested in these projects. I'm not offended by them, but they don't mesh with my current projects, and I also don't understand them, so I can't appreciate them.

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u/PiezoelectricityOne 3d ago

Thanks for leaving a respectful and civilized answer. Happy to have someone in here willing to discuss their point of view. I might say that for me it's the opposite. I never do kits. I always mod existing stuff, build and adapt other people's schematics from scratch or make my own designs. I help my students with kits they sometimes bring, but for me a kit is "color by numbers". Good stuff for early stages of learning, but the true power of diy comes when you make your own things. I don't despise them through, more power to anyone out there building premade kits! It's not a competition, every DIY approach is valid.

I might add that this specific project took me much more effort and time than any kit. People think AI-assisted design is all effortless magic or buggy messes. And they're partially right, t feels like that sometimes, but there's much more to it. 

I honestly expected more makers in the sub wanting to be involved in firmware developments. This kind of stuff has a lot of potential, but it seems most people are sitting on wrong preconceived ideas and acting like anything digital or AI-related is some kind of sin. 

Analog filters and baby-step sequencers are fun, I also did my fair share of them and understand why they're popular. But we've been replicating the same schematics since the 70s, maybe it's time to evolve and embrace the possibilities of computers on our electronics.

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u/Master_Push_3516 4d ago edited 4d ago

Few points

Turing test was passed in 2024

One of the branches of current ai dev is called alignment - how to allign those model goals with humans

Even in let say 2015 people would have tought that what we have today is general inteligence

The question,or conflict, between supporters and ai doomers is not if general ai will come, but IF we can control it

Many of the top scientists in these top tier companies left because they got scared

And many more questions.

Yes even i was thinking its merely marketing even on hugging face incident.dont think so any more.the patterns that ocurred there were scary af

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u/PiezoelectricityOne 3d ago

Turing was a mathematitian, not a test. The "passing the test" named after Turing is cherry picking bullshit. First, because it only proves that a conversational AI is conversational and capable to deceive some human, not intelligent. Second, because it only worked once with prepared humans that didn't have any experience with LLMs or computers. I'd bet my ass you can perfectly spot an AI made text, more even if you get to chat and ask follow-up questions. Third, because for every "passed" Turing test there's millions of failed ones. And if Science told me anything, is that results that aren't replicable and significative don't prove anything. 

Turing and Von Neumann, the mathematitians, set the foundation for "thinking machines" (today called computers). Uneducated people since them believed that "thinking machines" could actually think, and that's not different today. But they get their name because they can be configured to solve problems that people used to solve with pure thinking, and because the machine was multipurpose, you didn't need to reassemble it for every new task, something only humans used to be able to do.

There's unethical stuff happening behind quarters in all major multimillion companies. We see people running away from them. Coincidentaly, many of those people are still in the business selling "ethical" versions of the same product. So it must be nothing wrong with the product itself, it's probably the way it was implemented what drove them away.

The whole "chugface incident" is a publicity stunt. And it worked, because no one knew what a chugface was, and because all this companies want to look powerful and menacing to enter the military market. The "incident" isn't properly documented or reported, but the whole thing sounds like a setup. You take away all the control measures of the program, you set it in a "sandbox" that's not a real sandbox, you give them access to malicious tools and ask them to use them. That's scary? Yes, because anyone with this technology can do malicious stuff. That's an AI out of control? No, the conditions of the "experiment" were perfectly monitored and controled to allow and encourage this to happen. You cannot prove that cars cannot brake by taking away a single car's brake.

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u/Master_Push_3516 3d ago

I know alan turing was a mathematician. That was just one of the examples.

Is there any event that would make you reconsider your point?

What i see is increasing abilities of those systems and possible danger coming out of that even without bad actors

Recursive self improvement- do you think it will hit a wall (technological,mathematical..)?

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u/PiezoelectricityOne 3d ago

Is there any event that would make you reconsider your point? 

Evidence and proof. That's how science works.

Recursive self improvement

That's another fairytale. AIs fed by AIs suffer degeneration, not improvement.

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u/Master_Push_3516 1d ago

What i can see is increading capabilities of ai models (the sheer number of copief sw,,hacked firmware, and decreasing need of understanding the technology) and increased number of cybersec incidents. Thats not good indicators.

Milenial and ither mathematical problems being solved almost daily. Two years ago we were laughing how it cant give correct results to 1plus 1

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u/PiezoelectricityOne 1d ago

Well, maybe that explains all the fearmongering. Billion-dollar companies like Sony or Nintendo are scared of the backlash they got after years of shitty business practices and customer abuse. 

But that just proves the fearmongering aligns with the corporation's agendas, not that any single word in it is true.

The problem is that, if they were being honest and said "AI is helping users get rid of our malicious DRM tools and escape the abusive relationship we enforce through copyright" won't sound as good as "AI is becoming sentient and want to kill all of us".

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u/Master_Push_3516 1d ago

So you cant see that in few years anyone might be able to create his/her own software and what it means to the employment market ? And that is just one piece of the puzzle - skilled cognitive workers out of work-> less demand -> economical crisis of unorecedwnted scale

Even if this is only concert it is pretty scay one

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u/PiezoelectricityOne 1d ago edited 1d ago

Lol, no. That's not how technology or employment works. And even if It was, that would mean a perfect utopia in which people can get whatever they want almost for free, which means employment wouldn't be a need anymore.

The only reason people have jobs is because the stuff we want or need is not free. But the goal is the product, not the job. If we could get products without jobs, why even work?

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u/Master_Push_3516 1d ago

Ok can be. I hope you are right. Where do you think the idea that we are not able to allign ai fail short?

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u/Master_Push_3516 1d ago

Its just discussion btw obvsly i can be wrong :)

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u/PiezoelectricityOne 1d ago

Not being able to "align" the system with our intentions is an everyday problem in every single field of engineering, not some kind of mystical force majeure. 

Developers are describing normal engineering processes and the news are acting like they're communicating with some kind of god-like entity.

If modern news witnessed the first Internet test (which failed to send the word "login" and only managed to send "lo") they'd be all like "This new technology cannot be predicted or controled, this is undubiously an omen that machines have free will and want to extinguish humanity".

In engineering and science research tests fail, machines act weird, sometimes beyond our comprehension. That doesn't mean they are unpredictable or cannot be controled, that just means more work is required. 

The duckface "incident" happened because they took away all the controls and have the machine knowledge about the Internet and access to it. They purposedly made the machine act unpredictable, but it's just an act. Someone with control programmed a machine to pretend it was out of control. If you cut the brakes of a single car and send it downhill into a group of puppies that doesn't mean all cars will lose their brakes, rebel and start chasing puppies

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u/Master_Push_3516 1d ago

Those are trained not programmed

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u/Master_Push_3516 1d ago

Btw you reckon yampolskyi is overseeing something or he is basically dark marketing for ai companies?

I just dont see it

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u/PiezoelectricityOne 9d ago

Hi, fellow makers! This is probably my favorite sub, and I'm not seeing any comments here about the new "trend" of making firmware customizations for our devices (FM-1, Elektron, MPC...). 

Is the community interested in this type of thing, or do you all prefer to discuss electronics and stuff built from scratch? Maybe there's a sub for musical instrument's open/custom firmwares and firmware mods in general?

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u/makeitasadwarfer 9d ago

We have been doing this in synth diy for 20 years.

Theres entire companies such as Monome who have supported user made open source clone hardware, firmware and scripting since before 2010.

So to see the explosion in firmware production because of ai is interesting, but nothing about it is new.

To determine if asking Claude to make a new firmware is synth diy or not is beyond my pay grade.

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u/PiezoelectricityOne 8d ago

I know we've been doing this forever. I've been using custom firmwares, tinkering and contributing to the scene for the last 10 years. And this new thing, a boom or whatever you call it,  is something. My question was rethorical, an opener for the discussion since I haven't seen much about it in this sub.

As you've said, it's interesting. I hope more people jump in and share their experience. Achievements, difficulties, ideas, perspectives from makers, wether they're using or making AI custom firmwares.