Gravity goes open source

What's up?

Gravity started 3 years ago as a hobby project. Back then I didn't know much about electrical engineering and didn't have a lot of experience in coding, and it was a huge help and inspiration for me to be able to see how more experienced people do stuff in open source projects. This helped me to learn a lot and get started pretty quickly. Before I even noticed it, after about half a year of prototyping and development it became a product that led me to start Sitka Instruments.

Given that things have been pretty slow at Sitka Instruments lately, I decided that it's time for me to give back to the community and make Gravity open source. After all, I was planning it to be open source from the very beginning, it just happened to become a commercial product faster than I had a chance to rethink the open source part.

What this means

This means that now you can make your own DIY Gravity. It should be an easy and affordable build. The design uses SMD components (0805, not the most crazy ones), but it's possible to adapt it to use only THT components, or even build it all on the stripboard.

You can even make a commercial run of clones as long as you open source the changes you make (check the licenses in the repos for more info) and clearly state that it's a clone. And it would be nice if you donated to some Ukrainian charity* if you make any money off it.

And, of course, this means that you can check the code and schematics, and hopefully learn something helpful for your own projects. But, full disclosure, it is far from being perfect, and I'd do a lot of stuff differently if I were to start today from scratch. Still, a couple hundred people are happy with this module the way it is now.

Community firmwares

There are a lot of great community developed alternative firmwares in the world of eurorack. Hopefully Gravity will be no exception. Adam Wonak already developed several cool firmwares ranging from a different take on clock to Euclidian sequencer and even comparator. If you know how to code and want to make your Gravity do something different, go for it! It's Arduino-based, and Adam also created a libGravity to help you get started.

We don't have any chat or forum yet, so if you make something cool, you could share it on ModWiggler or just email me and we'll figure something out.

Where to find it?

The code is hosted on my own instance of Gitea, but feel free to clone the repos to wherever you want, be it GitHub or some other service. But if you do something interesting with it, please link to the original repo if possible.

• Firmware
• Hardware
• MIDI Expander Hardware

What's next?

I still have a small stock of Gravity boards and parts that I plan to assemble and put on sale on my Etsy within a couple of months. I don't plan another run of boards at the moment. If I do, I'll probably make another revision, and update the schematics.

There are also a couple of firmware updates that have been in development for too long (you might have seen that there's been a 1.1.3 beta and 1.2 alpha for some time in the firmware updater), I hope to get back to them in the coming months, but now that it's open source, maybe some of you could also try to improve something?

 

Stay creative, do cool stuff, cheers,
Oleksiy

 

* Just a couple of Ukrainian charities to choose from:

• https://www.hospitallers.life/needs-hospitallers
• https://tabletochki.org/en/
• https://savelife.in.ua/en/donate-en/#donate-army-card-once
• https://uanimals.org/en/