// the find
shanteacontrols/OpenDeck
A platform for building interactive control and sensing devices using MIDI and OSC built with Zephyr RTOS.
OpenDeck is a Zephyr RTOS-based firmware platform for building MIDI and OSC control surfaces — think DJ controllers, DAW control surfaces, sensor interfaces — without writing any firmware yourself. You configure it through a browser-based UI, flash it onto one of ~25 supported boards, and wire up your hardware. It's aimed at hardware makers who know their way around a soldering iron but don't want to spend weeks debugging USB MIDI state machines.
The board support matrix is genuinely impressive: RP2040, ESP32-S3, STM32F4/H5/H7, nRF52840, Teensy 4.x — all with proper Zephyr device tree overlays rather than copy-pasted HAL hacks. The MIDI feature set goes well beyond basics: 14-bit NRPN, configurable encoder modes, per-component channel assignment, and Bluetooth MIDI on nRF targets. OSC over Ethernet with mDNS discovery is a real differentiator for installation work where you don't want USB cables everywhere. The browser configurator being available offline (as a downloadable app) is a practical decision that matters when you're on stage or in a studio without internet.
OSC support is conspicuously missing from most boards — it requires Ethernet, which rules out the popular RP2040 and STM32F4 targets entirely, so the feature table has a lot of 'No' in that column. The official hardware story is thin: one board available to buy, and it's the MIDI-only variant, which means anyone wanting OSC has to assemble their own shield stack from Adafruit/WIZnet parts. Getting the Zephyr build environment running is still a non-trivial ask for hardware folk who aren't CMake-fluent — the devcontainer helps, but it's a large dependency to pull in just to flash firmware. There's no mention of a testing framework for the firmware logic itself, which makes cross-board regressions hard to catch when you're maintaining overlays for 25+ targets.