EZ MIDI Roadmap and How Licensing Works

You design the circuit. EZ MIDI handles the digital side. No firmware to write.

Why we changed how EZ MIDI is sold

We used to sell EZ MIDI as boards, or as bare microcontrollers pre-flashed with our code, in single units or in bulk. We’ve moved to a code and activation license model. Here’s why.

Regulations. Shortly after EZ MIDI launched, we started running into rules around purchasing and shipping microcontrollers. Most of this only an issue when parts cross national borders, but it’s hard to know what will change next. Large national and international distributors are far better equipped to handle this than we are.

Tariffs. The STM32F103 is manufactured overseas and passes through multiple borders during production and before it reaches you. Tariffs make that supply chain unpredictable, and some of our users are international as well.

We don’t want to be your bottleneck. If your product depends on EZ MIDI, a delay on our end shouldn’t stop your production line.

What this means for you: you buy the microcontrollers from whichever distributor works best for your region and budget. You flash the code and activate each unit with the EZ MIDI activation board. Supply stays entirely under your control.

Download only what you need

EZ MIDI started as an all-in-one solution. We use it internally for our own pedals, and we sell it as a product, so we wanted you to be able to order one version and design around it before knowing exactly what the finished project would look like.

The catch was an all in one solution is harder to maintain. Every update meant re-testing every feature from scratch.

What’s under the hood

You don’t need to know any of this to use EZ MIDI, but here’s where it comes from.

EZ MIDI started in 2018 and 2019 as code written in Mbed, a cross-platform framework that was great for rapid prototyping and let us move between microcontroller families easily.

Once we settled on ST’s STM32 family, Mbed’s limitations started to show, particularly in processing speed and memory usage. So we wrote our own libraries on top of ST’s hardware abstraction layer (HAL), the low-level code that talks directly to the chip. This includes some of its basic functions like reading pins. That made EZ MIDI faster and leaner, and it also meant we no longer needed Mbed’s cross-platform advantages.

Mbed uses an older version of ST’s HAL, while ST’s current tools, like STM32CubeIDE, use a newer one that renames some of the macros. For long-term support, we’re updating our modules to match and will eventually move the whole project into ST’s native development environment.

Now that EZ MIDI is distributed digitally, you can download the version built for your project. Smaller builds mean faster testing, fewer surprises, and quicker updates.

Where things stand:

• EZ MIDI MCP (digital pot version) is available now. We built it first because it let us test the core of the system in its simplest form.
• Additional versions are planned. The MCP version itself may also split into several branches as we add features. The LFO version should be ready soon.