Fred's Lab OCTANE - The USB MIDI Octopus

video upload by Fred's Lab

"Octane is the first 16-port, 8 in / 8 out MIDI HUB with 3.5mm TRS jacks. Connect your whole setup of synths, drum machines and controllers to your computer, tablet or phone over a single USB cable.

And it's open hardware: the schematics, layout and firmware are provided. You can modify it, build on it and make it your own. Therefore, Octane is highly customizable, so you can set up specific routing, filtering and behavior to fit the way you make music.

Designed and built by Fred's Lab."

You write the patch in a web editor (work in progress): fredslab.net/bucket/tentacles.

Currently on kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fredslab/octane-the-usb-midi-octopus


OCTANE

8 MIDI in. 8 MIDI out. Your setup, anywhere.

All the TRS MIDI for your portable studio, in one compact, rugged box. Less adapters, no ground loops, no compromises. Designed for musicians who dare to take their music gear wherever the music happens.

Octane is a straightforward MIDI HUB, and it's fully open hardware. No need to reverse engineer, we provide you with all: the schematics, the firmware, and the case. Everything is distributed under permissive licenses, so you are encouraged to study, modify, and repair the product along its lifetime.

Propelled by modern and community-friendly tech, Octane is powered by a Raspberry Pi RP2354 MCU running a Rust stack.

SOFTWARE

Octane comes with not one but two firmwares!

Switching between them is a single drag and drop of a file, and you can switch back at any time.

Basic firmware, pre-installed

A class-compliant 8-in / 8-out USB MIDI interface. Plug it in and all the ports show up in your DAW: no driver, no setup.

Tentacles, the extended firmware

Tentacles turns Octane into a programmable MIDI hub. A patch script describes which processing blocks to use and how to wire them between the MIDI jacks and the USB ports.

Route any input to any output, or to several at once

Merge several sources into one output

Filter MIDI messages by type and channel

Transpose, remap channels, remap CCs, reshape velocities, split a keyboard into zones, rescale controllers...