Report: Free Tulip Creative Computer 2026

The Tulip Creative Computer - a portable Python synthesizer for music and graphics

Tulip is a low power and affordable self-contained portable computer, with a touchscreen display and sound. It's fully programmable - you write code to define your music, games or anything else you can think of. It boots instantaneously into a Python prompt with a lot of built in support for music synthesis, fast graphics and text, hardware MIDI, network access and external sensors. Dive right into making something without distractions or complications.

The entire system is dedicated to your code, the display and sound, running in real time, on specialized hardware. The hardware and software are fully open source and anyone can buy one or build one. You can use Tulip to make music, code, art, games, or just write.

You can now even run Tulip on the web and share your creations with anyone!

Tulip is powered by MicroPython, AMY, and LVGL. The Tulip hardware runs on the ESP32-S3 chip using the ESP-IDF.

If you're nervous about getting or building the hardware, try it out on the web!

I've been working on Tulip on and off for years over many hardware iterations and hope that someone out there finds it as fun as I have, either making things with Tulip or working on Tulip itself. I'd love feedback, your own Tulip experiments or pull requests to improve the system.

A new small option: get yourself a T-Deck and install Tulip CC on it directly! Check out our T-Deck page for more detail.

Once you've bought a Tulip, opened Tulip Web, built a Tulip or installed Tulip Desktop, you'll see that Tulip boots right into a Python prompt and all interaction with the system happens there. You can make your own Python programs with Tulip's built in editor and execute them, or just experiment on the Tulip REPL prompt in real time.

See the full Tulip API for more details on all the graphics, sound and input functions.

Source: HackerNews