Does Anyone Repair An Old Ti Nspire Cas

Math squad flavour is upon us. I had an unusually large number of kids try out, and fifty-fifty after cuts, we had a record number of kids on the team, 32. When the start of the season nears, one of my preseason jobs is to get the team TI-Nspire CAS handhelds out of the closet, both to update to the latest OS, and to make sure they all notwithstanding boot upwardly. My students take great care of their Nspires, but nosotros were early adopters, then our original TI-Nspire clickpads are coming up on 6 years sometime, and I'm always a little nervous during this procedure.

Yesterday, despite irresolute batteries a couple of times, 3 of my old TI-Nspire clickpads would not ability up. With so many kids on the team this yr, I can't afford to take that many CAS's out of committee. Since the math team budget at our schoolhouse is zero, I take to fund enhance for every computer we buy, and I can't just magically produce a few more.

With these CAS's refusing to turn on and being years beyond their warranty, I figured I had nothing to lose by opening them upwardly to come across if I could find the source of the problem myself. I'g far from an electric guru, but I thought maybe I could get lucky and the problem would obvious. In fact, after a little fleck of investigating, I did effigy out the problem.

DISCLAIMER: To be clear, I'thou Not suggesting this as a solution to anyone else. I'm sure this is not a Texas Instruments approved solution, and if your Nspire is still under warranty, I'll be this this will void information technology (if you are still under warranty, phone call them up at one-800-TI-CARES; they will set up it for you). I also don't know if this will work for anyone else. You lot could crusade farther harm via this process. It may have been a stroke of luck that this worked on ii of my three TI-Nspire CAS's. With all that said, if you're curious about what worked for me, feel gratuitous to read on.

Equally I said, I'm non an electric expert, and so I'll be using layman'due south terms here. I started by removing the six screws on the back of the Nspire CAS. I didn't have a star head screwdriver small enough, and then I really had to use a specialty drill fleck that I had which was a perfect fit. Side by side I gently pried the front and dorsum halves autonomously, allowing me to see the inner parts of the Nspire.

Open up TI-Nspire CAS

I was operating on the assumption that somehow the circuit formed when I insert the batteries might be broken. If the trouble was bigger than that, I probably wouldn't exist able to fix it anyway. What I realized was that there are four metal wire clips that come from the battery compartment on one half of the Nspire and make contact with 4 tiny metallic plates on the other one-half of the Nspire.

TI-Nspire metal clips Here are the 4 metal clips. The view of the lower left one is obscured by the bombardment compartment.

It appeared that, through the years, the metallic wire clips have actually rubbed clear through the metal plates to the plastic on the other side, breaking the excursion. To examination this theory, I actually inserted a small slice of aluminum foil over the plate, airtight the Nspire CAS back up, and attempted to beginning information technology again. Certain enough, information technology started on the very offset try.

TI-Nspire metal clips 4 metallic pads where contact occurs, peculiarly notation the pigsty worn in the lower correct ane.

Conspicuously, aluminum foil is non a long term solution to this problem, but a tiny amount of solder is. I simply added a flake of solder from a soldering iron to each of the metallic plates where the clips had worn through to plastic, and two of the TI-Nspire CAS's were upward and running over again. The third 1 remains stubbornly powered downwards. If I ever discover a solution, I'll be sure to update this post.