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Break

Firmware for Alchemy Lab (Hermetic Modular)

Drum-break firmware for the Alchemy Lab V2 that plays sliced breaks from an SD card in the ectocore.rocks layout and mangles them with a seeded per-slice glitch engine.

by Tim Cox (timncox)

ActiveSource: openMIT
Alchemy Lab without a panel, its six pots surrounded by lit RGB LED rings, beside the Spagyros and Echoa front panels
Photo: Hermetic Modular, manufacturer press kit, cleared for editorial use, via hermeticmodular.com
Distribution
Prebuilt image you flash yourself
Requires stock
Alchemy Lab V2 board
Source
github.com https://github.com/timncox/break-alchemy
Homepage
timncox.github.io https://timncox.github.io/alchemy-lab/break/

Description

Break reads sample banks laid out the way the ectocore.rocks card exporter writes them, with slice points, kick and snare marks and effect settings, and plays them through the glitch engine from Smack. Controls cover how many slices get an effect, amen-style looping of random slice runs, sample and bank choice, a DJ filter, clock ratio and tap tempo. A script in the repository can build a compatible card from your own break recordings. The author states it is a clean-room implementation from a format description, contains none of the GPL-3.0 code of the project it takes its card format from, and is MIT. The only release is an early build that has not been run on a module. Hermetic Modular did not write or endorse it.

Install notes

Copy break_alchemy.bin into the /alchemy folder of the module's microSD card and switch to it from the SD picker of a family firmware that is already running (hold B2 and B3 for two seconds, then B1). It needs a FAT32 card with breaks in the ectocore.rocks layout, either exported from that site or built with the repository's make_card.py script. The release is an untested early build.

Version history

Break version history
VersionDateNotes
firmware-2026-10-062026-10-06Pre-release with Seq, Break and Stencil builds; not yet played on a module.

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