CHOMPI is now open source

And officially discontinued

written by Joel

Hey everybody,

I have a couple big CHOMPI announcements today. 

  1. CHOMPI is now open source

  2. CHOMPI is now discontinued 

I’ll talk all of this through below, but this video covers the important bits:

CHOMPI is discontinued 

I’ll start with the bad news first:
We are officially discontinuing CHOMPI. 

What this means:

  1. We will not be manufacturing any more CHOMPI.

    a. We do still have some in stock. Once they’re gone, that’s it.

  2. We are not working on any more alternate firmwares for CHOMPI.

  3. We will continue providing support for CHOMPI.

    a. With the exception of DIY hardware and firmware, more on this below. 

I do want to stress #3, and it’s part of the reason we decided to make CHOMPI open source: We love CHOMPI, and we’ll continue to support anyone who has or will buy one. If something needs to be fixed, or you have questions or need guidance, we’ll take care of you. 

We’re not abandoning CHOMPI, we’ve just had to accept that, unfortunately, it would be too expensive to keep making them going forward. It’s been a tricky, unexpected situation to navigate, but that’s how it is sometimes. We’re doing our best to handle it the right way and take care of the people that have invested in CHOMPI, and that’s what brought us here today and to the decision to go open source.

CHOMPI is open source

Good news time:
We have made every part of CHOMPI open source, including some new things you haven’t seen before. You now have everything you need to edit firmware, create your own firmware from scratch, and even physically build a DIY CHOMPI of your own. It’s all in there. 

This includes a new firmware called WAVE that we’re releasing as a recommended starting point. It’s a wavetable synthesizer, and it’s also available as a firmware for you to download and test out. It’s a “beta” firmware and probably has a bug or two in there – we’re releasing it primarily as a resource for getting started with open source, but it’s fun and musical so we figured everyone should be able to play it. You’re free to dive into TAPE or TEMPO as well of course, but they will be harder to work with (we basically used up all available processing while making them.)

Everything is organized and stored on the CHOMPI Club website, and if you want to discuss your projects with the rest of the CHOMPI community those conversations will be hosted on our Discord.

This is new for us, and honestly pretty exciting. If you’re curious I do recommend watching the video above, if for no other reason than to meet Julian, the engineer who offered to share and prepare all of this code.  

The only other thing I do want to make clear is that we will not be providing support for the things (hardware or firmware) made using these open source files – e.g. repairing DIY units, troubleshooting new firmware, etc. We’re handing CHOMPI over to the community, and it’s up to you what you do with it. 

Okay, I think that’s all. 

From myself, Tobias, Chelsea, and Julian, I want to say thank you. I hope this kicks off a vibrant chapter for CHOMPI.

Don’t hesitate to write us here if you have any questions:
help@chasebliss.com

Long live CHOMPI!