Ambika gets an update; a beautiful white on black OLED screen !

Originally the synth had a white on black Optrex LCD which was really nice. But when I found out they weren’t available anymore I frantically start searching for a replacement. To replace mine if it was to break or for another build. I contacted the distributor, wholesalers, the manufacturer, even the last company that placed an order just to see if they had some leftover stock. Bot nothing .. absolutely nowhere to be found. And I wanted white on black !

Occasionally though, I came across these OLED screens, which looked amazing but usually they were graphical displays like on your smartphone or they were matrix displays but to small. And I wasn’t even sure if these could be used at all with this synth. After some more digging I noticed this yellow on black OLED 40×2 matrix display. It was close. So I contacted the manufacturer, Raystar and asked if they might have other variations. They told me they did, white on black ! Yes ! Turns out they only just released it.

Now this OLED is fully pin compatible with the LCD so I could just drop it in. The only problem was .. they use a lot more power. 230mA instead of the measly 3.3mA the LCD uses. The synth’s power supply should be able to handle this but some people I spoke to said the voltage regulator might get to hot. And I might want to replace it with a buck converter instead. So I ordered two different ones with the display.

Now I tried these DC-DC converters and they worked fine, but both generated an audible high frequency noise in the audio path. You almost couldn’t here it but I knew it was there and I wasn’t having that. So I decided to just use the voltage regulator, have the synth play all its voices for half an hour and monitor how hot it would get. It didn’t really get that hot at all, super !

Looks great doesn’t it ! Very crisp and readable from different angles, much better than the LCD.

You can find the OLED display here at TME

Raystar Optronics REC004002AWPP5N00000