Meet the Q-Tune SDK: Build Your Own Tuners and Standby Screens

Q-Tune has always been a tuner you build. Now it’s also a tuner you can build on. The Q-Tune SDK is here, and it lets you write your own tuner displays and standby screens for the pedal.

What you can build

There are two kinds of plugins:

• Tuner displays. The screen you watch while you tune. Build a gauge, a needle, a strobe, pixel art, whatever you can draw. Your plugin gets the detected note, how many cents sharp or flat you are, and the user’s settings to work with.
• Standby screens. What’s on screen when you’re not tuning. Visualizers, animations, a set list, a clock, anything that fits.

The SDK comes with working samples to start from: gauge and phase tuner displays, plus a couple of standby screens.

Who it’s for

The SDK is built around C++ and LVGL, the same graphics library Q-Tune runs on. If you’ve drawn anything with LVGL, you’ll be at home. You don’t need to be a deep embedded engineer, and if you’d rather not write it all by hand, there’s a guided way to describe the screen you want and generate a starting point.

Builds run in Docker, so you don’t have to assemble a local toolchain. Clone the repo, start from a sample, build, and load it onto your Q-Tune.

It’s open source

The SDK is Apache-2.0 licensed, so you’re free to build plugins, share them, and even sell them. The screen is 240 by 320, and your plugin can run in portrait or landscape.

Start building

The SDK and its docs live on GitHub: q-tune-sdk. The README walks through setup, the samples, and how to get a plugin onto your pedal.

Why we built it

Most tuners never change after the day you unbox them. We wanted Q-Tune to be different. Firmware updates already make it better over time, and the SDK takes the next step: the people who own one, and the community around it, can make it their own.

Don’t have a Q-Tune yet? Take a look.