Texas Instruments BA II Plus (2015)

Production of the BA II Plus (2014) was transferred in 2015 from China to Kinpo Electronics' Batangas facility in the Philippines. The only visible changes are minor changes on the calculator label and its packaging to reflect the new country of origin.

Disassembling the featured BA II Plus with Date code L-1015A and manufactured in October 2015 by Kinpo Electronics, Inc. in the Philippines reveals a well known internal construction centered around a single-chip calculator circuit mounted in Chip-on-Board (COB) technology directly on a double-sided printed circuit board (PCB) and powered by a CR2032 battery.

Removing the small blob of epoxy resin protecting the chip of the BA II Plus calculator reveals a microcontroller marked with FF46 and manufactured by an unknown semiconductor company. Die size approximately 200 mils * 205 mils / 5.1 mm * 5.2 mm. Die Photo courtesy of Sean Riddle.

Inspecting the PCB of this BA II Plus calculator brought our attention to a small mark reading BF16-10-2, we noticed similar marks already with other Slide Rule calculators manufactured by Kinpo Electronics and started compiling a list of the PCB-Marks on calculators manufactured by OEMs for Texas Instruments.

You might have heard about faked smart phones and game consoles offered at the Huaqiangbei Ghost Market (Fake Market) in Shenzhen, China's largest counterfeit goods night market. Please be aware of faked BA II Plus calculators sold on eBay and other markets!

Here at the Datamath Calculator Museum, we observed an uptick of "too good to be true" offers of the BA II Plus and they had two things in common:

We decided to acquire some of these suspicious calculators (around $15 to $20 per unit instead the usual "street price" of $30 to $35) and share our findings how to authenticate a BA II Plus with the Qusure BA II Plus.

As a side effect of our investigation into the "fake" BA II Plus calculators did we disassemble the featured authentic BA II Plus manufactured in October 2015 completely to inspect its PCB, keyboard contacts, LC-Display and injection molded housing parts and added the BA II Plus (2018) to our collection.

Don't miss the Fiamo ABA10 Advanced Financial Calculator, a street-legal alternative of the BA II Plus.

If you have additions to the above article please email:joerg@datamath.org.

© Joerg Woerner, February 23, 2025. No reprints without written permission.