Matrix 6 display and PSU replacement

DIY STUFF
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I picked up a cheap Matrix 6 a while back and made some repairs to get it working fully. But it had intermittent boot issues and that bugged me a little. Also I had seen an article from Tauntek about replacing the VFD display with an LCD which intrigued me.

So after contacting Bob at Tauntek he sent me the code and I bought the necessary parts to replace the display. I was being cocky and decided to go for an OLED display instead of the LCD, but it only displayed half of the screen. First 8 chars. Bob was good enough to fix his code to work with an OLED or LCD depending on how you wire a pin high or low.

After then finding the OLED a little on the small side I went with a large 122mm 1601 LCD which fitted the display better.

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After this the inverter power was not required to drive the VFD high voltage so I could replace the old linear PSU and transformer with a switch mode. I used an RQ50C +/-12 and +/-5 PSU and it worked perfectly after making a nice connection for it. The Matrix 6 boots perfectly everytime now and has a universal power input.

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I can’t seem to edit the original post, maybe there is a time limit for edits, but I need to say it’s a MeanWell RQ-50B, not C used in the replacement.

B is +/-12v for the Oberheims.
C is +/- 15v I used for my sequential P600 build

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The OLED looks great, I may have to do that with my Matrix as well. Did the firmware need to be reflashed to update the code?

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What you are seeing is an LCD, the OLED was much shorter and smaller and not available in 122mm form factor. No firmware mods to the matrix are required. Bob at Tauntek kindly fixed the code for the display PIC chip to work with either an LCD or OLED.

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