Pocket calculator with ASCII?

Not exactly, but there were plenty of pocket computers from Sharp and Casio (inter alia) that are calculator size and have full ASCII (and you can program them in BASIC to do whatever binary ops you want).

You aren't the first one to notice this. I still have an HP-15C around -- works great -- and I prefer it to anything else that can be bought.

In fact, if you search Ebay, you'll find that most of the ancient HPs are selling for more now than they did new. I believe people are actually using them.

HP needs to get back in the game.

I also think there ought to be an "open-source" calculator out there, which would just be a good computing platform with a display and The calculators

It is all trash. Even HP is producing trash these days.

... snip ...

There is. See:

--
Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net)
   Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems.

An interesting idea. An open-source calculator.

While an open source computer might be a bit overkill as no one would ever agree on anything, a calculator. Now that just might be achievable.

But certainly with manufacturers. I don't know what's happened to them certainly in the last 10-years. There was some really good refined stuff emerging in the late 80's / early 90's. And then by the mid 90's everything became Plug'n'Play.

The Linksys WRT54g wireless router which runs firmware Linux, that's been a pleasant mistake of recent times though. They didn't *mean* to do it.

Hmmmm.......

Might be fun to design - the only sticking point would be the cases.

Cheers

PeteS

It could be done a number of ways. Just for giggles I would drop a controller into an FPGA, because then I can tune the instruction set ;)

Cheers

PeteS

I think we need the case first. :) With my dreamy hat on, we'd get the plastics engineers in on it. They get the end all be all engineering calcuator, and we get the firmware developer calculator. Produce a few

10,000 of them. Create the situation where the might of companies are no longer required for this sort of thing, and the engineers just finally manage to work together to produce something of a commercial standard. It's achievable as not too ambitious, but would anyone really want it.

:-)

As it happens, I know plastic designers (near Cambridge) - I use them for my products. I also know companies that sell the appropriate (lighted if requested) keys, the displays for graphing etc, LCD character mode displays, all the usual connectivity options.

On a related note, it would definitely be RPN ;)

Cheers

PeteS

I have seen this, productized - I think it was in 2001 or so. The device had an ARM processor - it might have been a StrongARM SA1110 actually. I found it while I was looking for eval boards for something or other. However please consider the point of diminishing marginal returns between a purpose-built calculator and a PDA running a calculator emulator.

One possible incarnation of an open-source calculator is a membrane keyboard with an 8- or 16-bit micro and say a 128x128 mono LCD. I'd buy such an item. But... where is the advantage over buying say a $100 TI-86 with a Z-80 micro, 128K of RAM and I don't know how much flash, a decent keyboard, a large graphical display, and a reasonably well-documented operating system? If you can be bothered, you can either find or write (in assembly or a kind of BASIC) software to do almost anything you want. Oh, and it has a full ASCII character set, plus Greek symbols and other math-specific glyphs :)

If, on the other hand, you CAN'T be bothered finding or writing software to customize a COTS calculator to meet your needs, then I'd argue you wouldn't be bothered with an open-source calculator either.

Agreed. With my immiediate need I've gone back to pen and paper doing it by hand.

I have a graphical calculator with symbolic algebra engine (required for the school courses I'm doing) and my old Casio nonprogrammable scientific fx-580 from high school (I probably bought it in 1989 or

1990). _ALL_ the calculations I need to do, can be done on the 580 (and that's what I use at home and at work in the lab). For matters where I need to poke about with algebraic manipulation, I find that I _need_ to put them down on paper to keep everything clear in my mind. On the calculator, it's like looking at five lines of sourcecode at once on a tiny screen; too much is invisible.

Calculators are designed for answering math course problems. Paper (and I must admit I use fountain pens too - I have a nice Parker Rialto I bought about ten years ago, and an older Parker pen from about 1966 that is my workhorse) is for design.

That would Cambridge, UK, I take it (from your email).

Definitely RPN, infix, prefix and any other fix - complete with flex and bison scripts.

I suspect that FPGAs are to pwer hungry for a calculator. An MSP430 is near the mark.

(another) Peter

The discussion on S/W floating point performance indicates that you have to run an MSP430 at significantly higher clock frequency than an ARM to do the computation. The AT91SAM7S series at 500 Hz will give you 10 Flops at 16 uA. (Have to use external LDO to get this value though) On the other hand you can get a lot of LCD segments in an 8/16 bit micro.

--
Best Regards,
Ulf Samuelsson
ulf@a-t-m-e-l.com
This message is intended to be my own personal view and it
may or may not be shared by my employer Atmel Nordic AB

It's

Try:

computers from Sharp and

Does anyone know why SHARP dropped out of the BASIC calculator market? Their PC-1500 was unique in its day and the later E500 was amazing for the price. When I come to think of it, it seems everybody has dropped out of the BASIC programmable calculator market.

Yes, but they have "fixed" that issue. The newer versions of the WRT54GS have smaller flash memory chips so that the "alternate firmware" no longer fits in it.

mikey