Kyiv-based Sitka Instruments is making the awesome Gravity Eurorack clock module open-source hardware. It’s an easy and affordable build, and there are already cool alternate firmwares available, with more to come. Sitka is supporting the community — and you can give back by supporting Ukrainian causes.
Oleksiy Hrachov aka Sitka has written up a detailed, lucid explanation of why this is happening and what it means:
Gravity goes open source [Sitka Instruments]
And you’ll find everything — here using the self-hosted and open-source Gitea (which is a great alternative to GitHub and Microsoft):
Hardware is under a CERN-OHL-S license, with software under GPLv3. That’s “strongly reciprocal,” technically, for CERN but — think of both of them as copyleft.
It’s really my favorite clock module, so it’s great to see this development. Not only is building Gravity something a lot of folks may be able to manage, but it’s easy to hack on, too. It’s Arduino-based, and developer Adam Wonak has created alternative firmwares and a helper library.
If you’ve done even simple Arduino work, libGravity will look really accessible:
https://git.sitkainstruments.com/awonak/libGravity
And then there are the alternate firmwares: ALT-GRAVITY (rewritten for libGravity), Euclidean, and Comprator (analyzes signals and gives you flip-flop plus AND, OR, XOR logic):
https://awonak.github.io/alt-gravity
In action:
More on the module — here’s a great “musical review” (like I have it playing and it’s fun to listen to):
And a groove from the creator — same, release this as a track, ha!:
This does not mean the demise of Sitka Instruments, though — far from it! I’m eagerly anticipating Flamingo. Watch this space. And keep supporting Ukrainians. The world is erasing and destroying — support the people who are resisting and creating. Oleksiy recommends:
- 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/
Previously: