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.
Generic Refills 