Why doesn't anyone (including TI) offer repair services for TI calculators?
Many of us repair LCDs, buttons, and other solderable problems with TI graphing calculators, but not as a service to consumers. Most of us that do so do it either for our own personal calculators, or buy cheap, broken calculators on eBay and fix them for personal use or to sell. Part of the problem with both TI offering a repair service and individuals offering a repair service is that the time and cost of repairing the calculators and then shipping them back out just doesn't make margins (profits) that are worth the time.
That makes sense. Has anyone found a company that sells replacement LCDs for the TI-84 PLUS?
Short answer: No, you have to buy other used/broken calculators to extract the LCDs from.

Long answer: Sort of. You can order the LCDs directly from any of the same manufactures that TI gets them from. You just have to know the right specs to ask for. (KermMartian can probably help you with that.) Unfortunately, when you order directly from the manufacturer, you have to order a complete production run. You might be able to get them for 50 cents a piece, but you'd have to order a minimum of $500 of them.
The issue then becomes that TI uses different components (LCDs) based on the country that they manufacture the calculator in. This is what I've heard, I don't know that fist hand.
They use different LCDs depending on which company happens to be selling them the cheapest when TI is looking to start their next production run. The B&W LCDs are probably completely interchangeable no matter which manufacturer produced them.

However, I see some unpopulated locations on the PCBs of the color calcs that suggest that TI planned to support some slightly different color LCD designs. Again, KermMartian may be able to shed some light on whether you'd need to pay attention to what's on the PCB to know which LCD modules are compatible. (This is quite common. Unpopulated locations on a PCB allow the manufacturer to choose the cheapest/best among several similar, but not identical, parts. They can then populate different combinations of resistors &c. depending on the exact specifications of the part chosen. Because prices and availability may change between production runs, this allows flexibility that saves money and reduces the time it takes to get a production run finished.)
This has all been very helpful. Thank you. I bought a couple of TI-84 PLUS calculators off ebay. One has a broken LCD and the other the keys respond really slow if at all. I hope to make one good one out of the two.

If I'm successful with this project I'll try it again on a TI-84 PLUS C SE.
Awesome! If you'd like, feel free to post your progress in a topic! We'd love to follow along and it'd also make a great place to ask questions if you have any along the way.
I would genuinely pay to have somebody order a production run of individual parts to sell online. Maybe $2-5 for an LCD, or maybe 3D printed lids and covers, would be a nice way to raise money for Cemetech.
oldmud0 wrote:
I would genuinely pay to have somebody order a production run of individual parts to sell online. Maybe $2-5 for an LCD, or maybe 3D printed lids and covers, would be a nice way to raise money for Cemetech.

I believe cemetech is a non-profit thing, so I'm assuming the money would go to what Kerm (and sometimes other admins I think?) pays out of pocket...
However, how would you sell 1000 LCDs? There are relatively few people looking to fix a broken LCD, I doubt that there would be much profit to be made, you might manage to cover your costs if you're lucky... and that's assuming everyone looking to fix their LCD wants to purchase a new one and finds out about this
mr womp womp wrote:
oldmud0 wrote:
I would genuinely pay to have somebody order a production run of individual parts to sell online. Maybe $2-5 for an LCD, or maybe 3D printed lids and covers, would be a nice way to raise money for Cemetech.

I believe cemetech is a non-profit thing, so I'm assuming the money would go to what Kerm (and sometimes other admins I think?) pays out of pocket...
However, how would you sell 1000 LCDs? There are relatively few people looking to fix a broken LCD, I doubt that there would be much profit to be made, you might manage to cover your costs if you're lucky... and that's assuming everyone looking to fix their LCD wants to purchase a new one and finds out about this


Well, there's always people out there willing to fix stuff themselves. Something simple like "Replacement LCD for TI-83+/84+", just put it on Amazon, and you'd be surprised at how many people would look it up. For many, it's cheaper trying to fix it yourself than to buy another one. And with instructions linked in the product page, there's no doubt people would order a new LCD and try to fix it themselves (yes, even if it requires mad soldering skills).

Also, non-profit just means the money earned has to go back to Cemetech (or charity), and it can't go back to Kerm's own pocket.
TIshane wrote:
This has all been very helpful. Thank you. I bought a couple of TI-84 PLUS calculators off ebay. One has a broken LCD and the other the keys respond really slow if at all. I hope to make one good one out of the two.

If I'm successful with this project I'll try it again on a TI-84 PLUS C SE.


Just to chime in here. Sounds like your link port is clogged. Clean it out and see what happens.
At the risk that this question will show my low level of knowledge............ but by link port do you mean the I/O port on the top left of the calculator?
Indeed. If there is sufficiently conductive material in the link port, the calculator can think that there is a device connected to the link port that is trying to talk to the calculator, and then the calculator spends all its CPU time trying to talk back, making it really slow. I don't believe the USB port can cause similar issues.
Old post, but to be realistic... after acquiring a lot of TI-82 with LCD issues... it seems the generic connection doesn't have standard spacing.

Making ribbon or spc cable alternatives far from ideal in terms of screen issues.

My intention was to buy copper ribbon rolls, and slice them.

If not the 18guage stranded soldering seems tedious and only else.

but I wanted to slice copper sheet rolls stacked precisely for easy screen repair.

---

as for com port, seen much battery leakage requiring pcb cleaning with 99% IPA.



ebay has the rolls of copper easily trimmable to fit, as for the absence of 3rd party adhesive screen connector replacements, i'm aghast. non standard spacing. Soldering is ok, but sliced copper rolls is my 100% bid though I could not afford it, best of luck.
Hi everybody, I bought very cheap a TI Voyage 200 with broken display. I start a project by trying to replace the display with a new intelligent display which has only 23 wires, RX240128A. I plan to remove all T6b07 and T6B08 since they are for no use any more. Initially Ive planed to use a 8 bit microcontroller to command the display, I even manage to display something on the screen with the microcontroller but analyzing the timings I realize that it is not possible to acquire all the data and display on the screen. Now I plan to use a cpld from xilinx or microsemi to cope with my specifications but I struggle to learn VHDL. I hope that there will be one day when I will succeed with my project. If anyone has some suggestions to make, I will like to hear it.
Welcome to Cemetech, tehnosoftex! Considering how unreliable the Voyage 200's screen is, replacing it with a new one is a superb idea (why didn't I think of that for my own broken Voyage 200?). Do you mean that analyzing the timings that the calculator currently uses to address the T6B07 and T6B08, you discovered that your microcontroller can't aggregate the screen image quickly enough? Are you trying to collect an image into a buffer on the microcontroller and then write that to the LCD, or pass every command through from the calculator to your new LCD (does its controller have an on-board framebuffer?). I suspect that using an FPGA is a bit overkill when a faster microcontroller might do the trick. What microcontroller were you exploring? Have you looked at any other options?
Well I repair calculator cases sometimes, made a new case Razz I used an IDE cable to replace an LCD cable once, it worked very well. I would second that until someone chooses to make a rather large investment for the greater good, buying a second calculator is the cheapest way to get an LCD.
KermMartian wrote:
Welcome to Cemetech, tehnosoftex! Considering how unreliable the Voyage 200's screen is, replacing it with a new one is a superb idea (why didn't I think of that for my own broken Voyage 200?). Do you mean that analyzing the timings that the calculator currently uses to address the T6B07 and T6B08, you discovered that your microcontroller can't aggregate the screen image quickly enough? Are you trying to collect an image into a buffer on the microcontroller and then write that to the LCD, or pass every command through from the calculator to your new LCD (does its controller have an on-board framebuffer?). I suspect that using an FPGA is a bit overkill when a faster microcontroller might do the trick. What microcontroller were you exploring? Have you looked at any other options?


Hi, thank you for your replay, at first I try to use a pic16f72 which happens to have in my scrap boards. My idea was to get the data for t6b07 and t6b08 and send into the intelligent display in real time by using this microcontroller. I even manage to send data and commands to the display and display something on the screen. I use a scope to see the timing from asic to t6b07 and t6b08. The ASIC send data on 4 bits to T6b07 at every 1.43 us, so is not possible to my microcontroller to get the data and send to display in 1.43us. There is another problem, the system based on t6b07 and t6b08 will swipe the data on rows from the bottom row to the top in batches of 4 bits. The intelligent display based on UC1608 controller gets the data in bites and accessing pages rather then rows , it has 16 pages x 8 bits instead 128 rows. So , to acquire data and send to the display it must store at first and send to display in proper order. I think that I could store the data in the display internal ram , and then to read and write in proper order, or I can use a microcontroller with at list 240x128=3.75k ram. The best solution I can think of is to use a pic18f6585 which has only 3.25k ram and use its psp (parallel slave port) and some logic circuits to get data from ASIC and store in its internal static ram , and after that to prepare the data and send it to the intelligent display. It seems to complicated, that's why I search another solution, and try to use a cpld. Now I struggle to learn VHDL and see if I will find a simple solution.
Personally, If someone could locate some nicely priced ti83+ and ti84 screens i would probably buy a bulk amount. it's much cheaper then buying ti73 explorers and pulling the screens off.
  
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