Deconstruction of a TI Nspire CX Calculator
pwood
Entry ID #: 1943
Created: Tue, Dec 15, 2015 9:11 AM
Cameron Knight Deconstruction of a TI Nspire CX Calculator I chose to deconstruct a TI Nspire calculator because I was interested in what was making this calculator, that I had used to help me, work. I was surprised to find very few chips and fairly little circuitry. It seemed like most of the processes that made this device run were taking place in the three main chips that can be seen inside. Inside I found a Samsung chip That appears to process the display outputs of the device. I also found two TI chips that appear to be processing the calculations and other operating system functions that make the device so complex. The Calculator was also separated into two circuit boards one for the user input and one for processing and display. On the processing board there were also tons of resistors and capacitors which were likely used for communicating between the chips. There was also one light emitting diode with a green plastic coating on the outside which is used for the power button on the calculator. a few transistors were also on the board. There are a lot of transistors inside of the square chip which seems to be the processing unit which many transistors used for processing. There was no documentation on the chips for the calculator available but I can assume that they are used for making the operating system and display of the calculator work as well as parsing the user inputs. On the user input circuit there were a bunch of buttons for user input. From this project I learned that most modern devices rely on small Integrated circuits rather than complicated Larger circuitry. I also Learned that single chip can do most of the heavy lifting in a complex system. Component I.D. Key Number Component 1 Resistor 2 Capacitor 3 Transistor 4 Dip 5 Integrated Circuit 6 LED