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Texas Instruments TI-1766 II (1st design)
With the TI-1766 Texas Instruments entered already in 1981 the market of basic LCD-calculators powered by solar cells. Due to the improvements of both the power consumption of the calculator electronics and the efficiency of the solar cells the size of the solar cells usually was shrunken from model year to model year.
This TI-1766 II introduced in 1986 continued this trend and its solar cells are just about half the size of the ones found in a TI-1766 (4rd design) introduced in 1983. In the meantime we discovered even from the TI-1766 II three different versions and it is difficult to understand, why the 2nd design – introduced in 1987 – increased the size of the solar cells dramatically!
Digging deeper into similar Texas Instruments solar-powered calculators of that era revealed a big surprise: There was obviously a switch back to larger solar cells in 1986. This may be illustrated best by the TI-60x series of calculators and their siblings TI-1768:
Calculator |
Introduction |
Manufactured |
Solar cells |
1986 |
11/85 |
Small |
|
TI-1766 II |
1986 |
03/86 |
Small |
1986 |
06/86 |
Large |
|
1986 |
03/87 |
Large |
|
1987 |
07/87 |
Large |
|
1987 |
05/87 |
Medium |
|
1989 |
10/90 |
Small |
|
1989 |
06/89 |
Small |
|
1989 |
08/91 |
Small |
Dismantling
this TI-1766 II manufactured in March 1986 by Inventec
Corporation in Taiwan reveals a clean design centered around an unidentified
single-chip calculator circuit soldered on a double-sided printed circuit board
(PCB) and powered by four small solar cells.
If you have additions to the above article please email: joerg@datamath.org.
© Joerg Woerner, April 28, 2008. No reprints without written permission.