I've always had to shave



*buzzer; Kerm was the one who started talking about buffers.

I mentioned it because he said that he took it out of a handheld and it had 3 wires coming out of the speaker/piezo buzzzer thingy. Normally handhelds don't come with actual speakers due to costs. But to clear this up foamy should probably scan in a pic of the speaker itself.

EDIT: Nevermind, look back at his pic; it IS a piezo; NOT a speaker that foamy's using.

Now for a quick schematic that no one seems to want to draw, but only explain:



I remember seeing a project similar to this that had two speakers embedded into the calc...I'll se if I can find it.

Sorry, that was a 12am typo. I meant *buzzer. And foamy, ult dev'rs got the correct schematic there.

Okay; I was wondering wtf a piezo buffer was

Well, before I read this I went to walmart and found a really good deal on a 3.5" speaker. I hooked it up basically like the schematic Ult Dev later posted but without the switch. I works in my cd player if I turn the sound up the whole way, but it doesn't make any audible noise from my calc. Do I need an amp of some sort or does my calc not have enough power for it? And what is the switch for?

You need an amp for your speaker (actually, some transistors should suffice...)

The switch is to break the circuit so that the calc's data line isn't pulled low, so that it doesn't think another calc is trying to send it data (basically the switch is there to keep your calc from locking up)

Oh, so the switch is just incase I want to leave it plugged in while not listening to music?

Yes; also, as soon as you plug in the device, if the music playing program or another program isn't running, then it will lockup your calc.

Exactly. For the amplifier, you can either use a simple darlington pair from switching transistors or ideally, power transisitors. You can find info on darlington pairs on wikipedia.

For an amp, there are at least 3 howtos for amps in the ticalc.org archives, but I think they may all be for internal amps.
(Kerm, you posted right before me!)

Which brings up a question...why is foamy trying to put the speaker into the hub when he can install it internally into his calc?

Because foamy knows that he is a noob. Do you guys remember the quote, "NO NO NO!! Don't connect that to your calc again!!"? That was from outside. Do you really think I should be messing around inside a $130 calc?

Yes, it's much harder to mess things up when you can see what's going on, and you now know what to do, so it's a simple matter of a little careful soldering and grinding (or drilling). Come to think of it, I've got a tiny speaker around I could use for a similar project.

The only soldering I've ever done was with a blowtorch...

I should maybe toy around with something like this, could be fun (heck, I have a number or soldering irons at my disposable, including a gas powered one).

I found a light switch, but I can't get it working. I put the switch in, but now music won't go through it. I stripped the ends on a 3inch piece of wire and bypassed the switch with it. I held one end of the wire on each of the screws that hold the wires in the switch. It worked fine like that. Does that just mean that the switch is bad? (And yes, I tried flipping the switch.)

I'd say so, unless there's some quirk with light switches that I down' know about.

the light switch could be causing too much resitance in the system though. Sometime in a 3.5mm headphone system, the wires are coated so each direction doesn't need to be shielded from the other. Run a wire around the switch and see what happens.

I found a new switch and it works fine.

@rivereye: It worked when I ran a wire around it, before.

ok, either the switch was bad, or way too much resitance for it.

I actually did this(I put an amplifer and a speaker INSIDE my TI. Go search on TICalc.org for my schmatics(sorry, no drawings, but it is perty explanitory.) I titled it "Putting an amplifer into your Ti-84" so have fun!


Also, http://home.comcast.net/~netham45/Amplifer_Instructions.zip has it.

Edit:I made it on m grandma's pc(640x480) so there will be someformatting issues on higher resolutins. Sorry.

Edit2:I just read it all..... Kind of offtopic, but the nice thing is that it doesn't lock my calc when I turn it on.