Ambika
Emilie Gillet designed it. I sourced the parts, soldered the boards, and made room for it in the studio.
Builder
- 6 (fully loaded)
- Voices built
- 7
- MCUs flashed
- 700+
- Patch library
I wanted to build an instrument from bare boards and components. Ambika gave me six voices and plenty to learn along the way.
Seven boards to bring up
Ambika is Emilie Gillet's open-source design from Mutable Instruments. I sourced the bill of materials and populated the motherboard and all six voicecards by hand: sockets, capacitors, pots, jacks, and hundreds of solder joints.
Each voicecard has an ATmega328p; the motherboard uses an ATmega644p. I programmed all seven with avrdude, paying close attention to the fuse and lock bits.
Two kinds of filter
I built four SMR-4 voicecards and two 4-pole cards to take advantage of Ambika's interchangeable filter designs. After calibrating the voices, I put it in a white enclosure with wooden end cheeks and collected more than seven hundred patches for its SD cards.
It now lives in my studio rack and gets played. The boards and finished instrument are pictured below; the original design is linked above.
A closer look
On the parts list