Monthly Archives: November 2015

I’ve had so many requests for new colors of ink! It was hard to narrow it down but we’ve got Green German ink refills coming for the Livescribe Pulse/Echo/Sky (57mm), as well as Black Japanese Gel Ink refills for the Pulse/Echo/Sky (57mm).

The Gel ink refills write very nice! but have so little ink in them. I personally would only use them to annotate notes that I’ve already taken or for drawing diagrams. Of course, you are welcome to use them however you see fit! Just be forewarned that you won’t get very many pages with them! The samples let me transcribe a good bit of the Constitution of the United States of America but not much more. I’ll let you know how the production model works out.

Nothing new for the Livescribe 3 yet.  What would you like to see? medium tips? new colors? gel ink (with the caveat that there probably isn’t enough ink in them to be practical for everyday writing). Let us know in the comments!

So Livescribe is sending me a new Livescribe 3 to replace my Sky with the dead OLED display. No charge, and they’re using FedEx. No fuss, no muss.

I wonder now, if I should have taken the other option, a new Echo. I could have taken the display from the new pen and swapped it into my Sky. Well, I’ve made my decision so no looking back! Lets put the new Livescribe 3 through its paces and see how it works with my (new to me) iPhone 6+. The big display should help a lot!

OK, good news for me! and maybe new news for you: Livescribe provides a 2 year warranty on OLED displays of recently purchased Livescribe Echo (and the discontinued Sky) pens.  I received an email from Livescribe telling me that my Sky wifi pen was nearing the end of its first year (on Dec 12th), and that the warranty for the pen was 1 yr, except for the OLED display, which is warrantied for 2 years.

Waiting to see what the warranty will provide and if I will have to pay anything for the service. I’d sure like to keep using the Sky wifi, even though I did just upgrade to the iPhone 6 Plus, just in case I switch over to using my Livescribe 3 for everyday notes.

Be sure to come back tomorrow!

My newest Sky wifi pen has been with me for less than a week, and the OLED display is now barely visible. This was a used pen purchased on eBay so I can’t say for certain how long the display has been used.

I have to say, this OLED display issue is giving me fits! I love how the Sky is integrated with Evernote. The wifi sync is nice but not totally needed since I dock my pen every night to charge so I sync using Livescribe Helper.

There is not a lot of information about repair of these displays on the internet. It seems that the OLED display is a proprietary 96 x 16 pixels instead of the more commonly found 96 x 18 displays. The Sky display has a ribbon connector with 10 pads, and of course, this is not very common either. It makes swapping in a new display problematic at best. Someone has reported that the chip that drives the display is labelled, “SSD1305” so it might be possible to figure how to drive a display with 10 pins: most have 14 or more pin outs.

There is some information about swapping your dead display with a working display – but it requires finding a working display. eBay does have some Echo and Sky pens for sale for parts but you aren’t guaranteed getting a live display, let alone a live display with a lot of life left in it!

A word of caution: I purchased a pen on eBay that was branded Livescribe Echo on the front, and Sky on the back. It didn’t work with Livescribe Helper (which is meant for the Sky) but it did seem to talk to the activation server at Livescribe so its probably an Echo in a mismatched case. Another pen I bought on eBay was labelled, “Echo wifi” and that didn’t make any sense at all so I returned it.

I do have a brand new Echo purchased directly from Livescribe. I’m tempted to swap its display for my Sky. As I’ve mentioned before, my soldering skills are weak at best, and the contacts on the display ribbon are tiny!

I’m going to try to live with this display-less Sky for now. At least it was working long enough for me to write down it’s mac address, and verify that it could join the wifi network at work. Not sure how I’ll select networks in the future since the display is so dim… more aggravation to come.

Happy Day of the Dead.