James has been hard at work on the MeeBlip firmware, both in response to your feedback and in order to improve things we wanted to improve. The result is firmware 1.04, which is now available via our Git repository.

What you get:

• MIDI CC RAM table added. Now, we get more MIDI control over sound – more on that soon. This is also an area ripe for further modification.
• PWM waveform with dedicated fixed sweep LFO. New sounds. This is one I’m most excited about.
• 8-bit multiplies optimized in main loop. Improved performance.
• LFO Sync switch now retriggers LFO on each keypress. LFO Sync actually wasn’t working quite as advertised – fixed.
• Initialize FM Depth to zero on power up. Users reported issues with FM depth; this should fix your problems.

How to get it

In order to upgrade the MeeBlip, you will need a USB AVR programmer – a device that allows you to modify the code stored on the AVR, the brain of the MeeBlip. (It’s the same brain that powers many other projects, including the Arduino.) Why not MIDI? Well, MIDI is really, really, really slow. By contrast, a couple of seconds will refresh your MeeBlip. And if anything goes wrong, you can simply reflash; it’s almost impossible to do any damage.

I’ve written an extensive guide to how to do this:
Upload New Firmware to Your MeeBlip

Don’t let the length scare you; I was being as complete as I could. Here’s the short version.

1. Get a USB programmer. ($15-20) If you want a fun, quick build and some soldering, buy Adafruit’s usbtinyisp. (Tom Whitwell of Music thing fame points us to a UK supplier.) Don’t want to solder? Get the Sparkfun project based on the Adafruit model. (Both are open source.)

2. Read the manual and install software for your OS – driver + software for Windows, software for Linux and Mac. It’s free.

3. Disassemble your MeeBlip if it’s in a case (or our QuickBuild kit) so you have access to the programming header, a six-pin connector.

4. Plug in the programmer, and run one line of code:
avrdude -c usbtiny -p m32 -U flash:w:meeblip.hex

You’re done! Of course, for more background, see my guide.

If you have trouble, contact us or (better) ask a question on the MeeBlip forum.

Don’t want to do that, either? We’re curious to see if any MeeBlip owners would want an option to buy a pre-burnt chip that they could drop into their MeeBlip to avoid the programmer. Let us know in comments.

Download the firmware

meeblip.hex is the file you want to upload to your MeeBlip

If you want to browse the source, check out meeblip.asm. (click the option for raw blob data to download the actual file)

And programmers, feel free to join us on Gitorious. The next step will be helping you out with how to hack (or even, if you like, more gently “modify”) your MeeBlip!