When we released CoyoPedal, we ended with a paragraph about owning hardware and choosing what runs on it. The discussion that followed on Reddit made it clear that paragraph was what people wanted to talk about. Here is the longer version.
After twenty-five years playing guitar and twenty performing, every multi-effects unit sold the same promise: hundreds of amps, thousands of presets, endless routing. In practice, working players land on a couple of sounds—one clean, one driven—and toggle effects as the song asks. Tweakability is real; it is also mostly beside the point. What keeps a unit on the board is mundane: inputs, footswitches, mic input, case fit, and whether those two nightly sounds actually sound right.
The industry competes on the menu and treats hardware as the delivery mechanism. For most of us it is the reverse.
Buy hardware for what it is
The Ampero II Stage is close to ideal as hardware—form factor, footswitches, knobs, microphone input—and has a three-core DSP with roughly five times the headroom of an ESP32. It still cannot run a full-size NAM A2 profile, not because the silicon cannot, but because the firmware was never written to.
That is the gap firmware freedom is about: pay for enclosure, converters, switches, and screen; do not accept that sounds, interface, and workflow are fixed forever by whoever wrote the firmware. Device neutrality has simply never been applied to the box under a guitarist's feet. An iRig HD X shows the point: the same hardware becomes an amp modeller when the firmware changes.
The chips are already good enough, and cheap
An ESP32-S3 (~$3) runs A2-Full live with six effects and a tuner, hosting USB audio and a touchscreen—CoyoPedal’s chip. An ESP32-P4 (~$4) now runs two A2-Full models in stereo dual-lane with ten more effect blocks. General-purpose MCUs with vector units have caught up on arithmetic, are dramatically cheaper, and come with modern toolchains, USB host, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth.
There is no secret sauce
Neural Amp Modeler is open-source; capture libraries are enormous and free; effects are textbook DSP. The hard parts—fitting a small chip and feeling like a pedal—are engineering. When models are open, effects are known, and chips are cheap, what remains proprietary is firmware—kept closed because it is the only thing still closed.
What we want to build, together
CoyoPedal is the seed for community-driven guitar-processing firmware under GPLv3, targeting S3 and P4 today and other platforms tomorrow. Invitations go to open-source contributors, guitarists, processor companies, and especially existing pedal makers: unlock the bootloader and document the codec, switches, screen, and DSP so community firmware can improve the hardware people already love.
Nobody is asking anyone to give away their own firmware. Unlock the door so a different one can go in.
Source: playtaurus.com/blog/firmware-freedom