Fixing the display ribbon cable on a TI-83 Plus calculator @LeadedSolder
Although it may not be considered an “old” computer, a TI-83+ from the futuristic year of 1999 has a lot of appeal. It’s got a Z80, it runs a BASIC interpreter with machine-language program support, and lots of fun homemade games were built for it over the years.
North of the Z80, we see a ribbon cable going to the LCD. There are surprisingly few pins going to the LCD board, and I reflexively buzzed them out to make sure they were continuous. Almost half of them (eight out of seventeen) didn’t seem to work! Could it just be that the glue holding the ribbon cable to the pads has deteriorated, or the cable itself got damaged by whatever was spilled inside?
I started the laborious process of cutting off 17 jumper wires, and stripping the ends.
30 more minutes of soldering onto the LCD panel, and it was finally done. I slapped some Kapton tape onto the LCD-side joints for safety. After this, it worked as normal: I was able to write a BASIC program and do some simple math.
See the entire repair and some more on this model in the post here.
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