Custom Firmware on the OP-1

naught101 · January 11, 2018, 11:52pm

@naught101
Yep, the iter svg is one of the included mods. I felt it was ok to include it since it doesn't contain any TE intellectual property. The tape does however, so I'm not quite comfortable in just including the modded SVG in my tool.

I've been thinking of creating an entirely custom tape graphic, but then again I would like to reuse the TE font, synth, drum and sequencer icons and the playback icons too. Otherwise it would look out of place... I'm not sure what to do because I really want to avoid legal issues. One option might be to write code that just makes changes to the original tape SVG so that I don't need to distribute the complete file at all...

EDIT: The modded tape.svg is 21.7Kb (the original is 18.7Kb)

@wavi: what about dumping the SVG somewhere public, where it doesn’t matter if it gets taken down, and then adding a mod option that lets users supply their own tape SVG?

Has anyone actually checked if TE cares about this stuff? They might be fine with you hosting a modded SVG on github…

eesn · January 12, 2018, 12:38am

i’ve always wondered why these reels are so f& big; could the tracks not be thicker and/or more visible instead

MirEko · January 12, 2018, 3:09am

Sure, this is what I'm currently using on my OP-1. Its fully usable. I also tried making a mashup of the tape screen and ApeTape but that didn't look very good. If I draw a completely custom tape screen I can post that too.

The screen is basically identical to the original tape except that the tracks are at the top.

Ah nice, are those icons that are overlayed all appearing at once though?

wavi · January 12, 2018, 9:25am

Ah nice, are those icons that are overlayed all appearing at once though?

On the OP-1 it looks fine. It hides the inactive icons and only shows the correct ones.

wavi · January 12, 2018, 10:43am

@wavi: what about dumping the SVG somewhere public, where it doesn’t matter if it gets taken down, and then adding a mod option that lets users supply their own tape SVG?

Has anyone actually checked if TE cares about this stuff? They might be fine with you hosting a modded SVG on github…

That would work but it still has the same issue of intellectual property… I’m not sure what TE thinks about this. I haven’t asked. They might be cool with it but on the other hand they probably don’t want their beautiful UI designs to be messed up

wavi · January 12, 2018, 10:45am

i've always wondered why these reels are so f& big; could the tracks not be thicker and/or more visible instead

Yeah. Could have been something like in this thread: https://www.operator-1.com/index.php?p=/discussion/3922/you-guys-seen-this
If you check out the top left of the image you see big fat tape-tracks with no reels at all.

eesn · January 12, 2018, 1:16pm

i've always wondered why these reels are so f& big; could the tracks not be thicker and/or more visible instead

Yeah. Could have been something like in this thread: https://www.operator-1.com/index.php?p=/discussion/3922/you-guys-seen-this
If you check out the top left of the image you see big fat tape-tracks with no reels at all.

yea i guess that’s too thick, something in the middle, i wonder if the segments inside the current SVG could be made say twice as thick? i feel an itch in my fingers to start messing about with this

wavi · January 12, 2018, 2:49pm

i've always wondered why these reels are so f& big; could the tracks not be thicker and/or more visible instead

Yeah. Could have been something like in this thread: https://www.operator-1.com/index.php?p=/discussion/3922/you-guys-seen-this
If you check out the top left of the image you see big fat tape-tracks with no reels at all.

yea i guess that’s too thick, something in the middle, i wonder if the segments inside the current SVG could be made say twice as thick? i feel an itch in my fingers to start messing about with this

I’m pretty sure they can, just change the stroke-width. I had lots of problems in the beginning because the OP-1 doesn’t understand Inkscape SVG files. I wrote a script to fix them if anyone is interested https://github.com/op1hacks/op1svg

wavi · January 12, 2018, 2:59pm

Since this is being talked about I think I’ll do that tape graphic right now
EDIT: I don’t seem to be able to affect the track thickness…

EDIT2: The entire track section doesn’t seem to care about line thickness, color or other parameters. As far as I can tell the only possible edit is the vertical position and height of the clips. So in essence the vertical position and the spacing between clips can be changed.

wavi · January 12, 2018, 8:28pm

Wow, I just found out that color.svg is actually a meaningful file. I always thought that it was just a reference color palette for designers. It turns out that the colors in it are actually used for all the dynamic (non static) graphics. So changing the colors does affect the interface, but not all screens. Interesting…

eesn · January 12, 2018, 9:27pm

EDIT2: The entire track section doesn't seem to care about line thickness, color or other parameters. As far as I can tell the only possible edit is the vertical position and height of the clips. So in essence the vertical position and the spacing between clips can be changed.

does it support tags ot transform attributes? maybe you could trick it to scale those to 200% height?

wavi · January 13, 2018, 12:18am

@eesn

Nah, the whole transform thing seems to be unsupported and so is the style attribute. The tag is supported though. I’ve had issues with moving stuff around in inkscape which creates transforms and style attributes. Neither of them do anything. Seems like the parser is rather basic in the OP-1. In fact the inkscape files don’t work at all on the OP-1 most of the time, unless I run them through my converter script.

anomalous · January 13, 2018, 8:42pm

@eesn
Nah, the whole transform thing seems to be unsupported and so is the style attribute. The tag is supported though. I've had issues with moving stuff around in inkscape which creates transforms and style attributes. Neither of them do anything. Seems like the parser is rather basic in the OP-1. In fact the inkscape files don't work at all on the OP-1 most of the time, unless I run them through my converter script. :/

You could check the linked libraries and see if they’re using a stock SVG lib. If so, the docs for that could give you an idea of what is possible with their SVG implementation.

lescour1 · January 13, 2018, 9:17pm

Would anyone be willing to email me a custom firmware with all mods for a donation?! I have no experience of doing this but I really desperately want the filter on master track!

wavi · January 14, 2018, 6:16pm

@lescour1
I can’t send it, but it’s not that hard to do your self. What OS are you running?

lescour1 · January 15, 2018, 12:16pm

@lescour1
I can't send it, but it's not that hard to do your self. What OS are you running?

Alright mate I’m on Mac OSX

wavi · January 15, 2018, 4:52pm

@lescour1
I can't send it, but it's not that hard to do your self. What OS are you running?

Alright mate I’m on Mac OSX

Cool. I did the installation on OS X and here’s the instructions I wrote down. Hope this helps you install op1repacker. If you need help with the tool after you’ve installed it let me know and I’ll write another section of instructions .

<h3 style=“box-sizing: border-box; font-family: “Source Sans Pro”, “Helvetica Neue”, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-feature-settings: ‘dlig’ 1, ‘liga’ 1, ‘lnum’ 1, ‘kern’ 1; margin-top: 0px; line-height: 3rem; font-size: 1.64571rem; margin-bottom: 0.07599rem; padding-top: 0.92401rem; color: rgb(55, 61, 73); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);”>Mac OS X Installation

First make sure you have Python 3 installed. To do that open launcher, find
terminal and launch it. While in the terminal type python3 --version and press
enter. If you get something like command not found you’ll need to install
python3 first.

<h4 style=“box-sizing: border-box; font-family: “Source Sans Pro”, “Helvetica Neue”, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-feature-settings: ‘dlig’ 1, ‘liga’ 1, ‘lnum’ 1, ‘kern’ 1; margin-top: 0px; font-size: 1.5625rem; margin-bottom: 0.546865rem; padding-top: 0.453135rem; color: rgb(55, 61, 73); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);”>Install Python 3

Skip this if you already have Python 3 installed

Install Homebrew by running the following command in the terminal:

ruby -e “$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)”
With Homebrew installed you can use it to install Python 3. Run the following
command in the terminal:

brew install python3
Python should now be installed.

<h3 style=“box-sizing: border-box; font-family: “Source Sans Pro”, “Helvetica Neue”, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-feature-settings: ‘dlig’ 1, ‘liga’ 1, ‘lnum’ 1, ‘kern’ 1; margin-top: 0px; line-height: 3rem; font-size: 1.64571rem; margin-bottom: 0.07599rem; padding-top: 0.92401rem; color: rgb(55, 61, 73); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);”>Install op1repacker

Run the following command (again in the terminal):

pip3 install op1repacker

Verify that it runs by running the command op1repacker --version
(it should print it’s version number)

naught101 · January 16, 2018, 5:07am

@wavi: what about dumping the SVG somewhere public, where it doesn’t matter if it gets taken down, and then adding a mod option that lets users supply their own tape SVG?

Has anyone actually checked if TE cares about this stuff? They might be fine with you hosting a modded SVG on github…

That would work but it still has the same issue of intellectual property… I’m not sure what TE thinks about this. I haven’t asked. They might be cool with it but on the other hand they probably don’t want their beautiful UI designs to be messed up

Fair enough. As you might be able to tell, IDGAF about TE’s intellectual property. They’re making a killing from the hardware, it seems like it would be in their interest to use the free labour of individuals like yourself to improve the firmware. It would be a pretty smart move to open up the firmware source code, and then use selected user mods to feed back in to the mainline firmware. Fair enough that they wouldn’t want their brand associated with sloppy work, but you’re not doing that, and there are plenty of ways to ensure that dodgy custom mods are not associated with their brand… /rant

Anyway, on a more practical level, can you describe the mods you made to the tape.svg? I tried moving all of the clip track components up, and all of the other components down (by whole pixel values), and then running it through your svg cleaner, but when I repacked and uploaded the firmware, the OP-1 didn’t like it - it starts booting, then gets stuck on a warped view of the boot screen, and booted no further… I did try saving it as an "plain SVG in inkscape, so maybe that was part of the problem…

naught101 · January 16, 2018, 5:23am

Hah… the no boot thing was probably caused by me leaving the svg script in the firmware folder before repacking

But after retrying, my tape screen is even more screwed up than your original attempt

lescour1 · January 16, 2018, 9:02am

Thanks for the help guys really appreciate your time. But I think I’m gonna leave it! I love my OP1 too much to mess with it