Open Source Calculator Teaches Us about Quality Documentation
hackaday.com
hackaday.com
The web site is snappy and has zero cruft. I feel like their design was inspired by or comes from the same school as Teenage Engineering, who made the OP-1 synthesizer.
These cats are doing amazing work. This is a masterpiece.
The only complaint I have (and its minor) is that the contrast on the case is poor. A black case with white, light blue, and orange labels would have been stellar, with the white case things fade into the background.
[1] https://github.com/numworks/epsilon/blob/master/LICENSE [2] https://www.swissmicros.com/dm42.php
No need to wonder, if by "free" you mean "free as in the fsf definition".
This violates at least freedom 4 by having the ND clause. You can't redistribute your modified version.
There is an ongoing discussion about what license to use for what part of the project, and what is the rational behind such and such choice. See this Github issue: https://github.com/numworks/epsilon/issues/38
otherwise of course, the website is masterful.
I would have bought one of these if the license was not so restrictive.
[1] https://opensource.org/osd-annotated
[2] Knight OS http://www.knightos.org/
Why should I own one, because it is open source?
BTW, the Prime is $50 more expensive than this thing and doesn't have the exam mode -> illegal to use in exams in France, for ex.
I think that any advantage of being able to run python is moot considering that it has only 256KB of RAM.
And for high-schools, personally, I think something simpler and less expensive would be nicer.
And I also wish there would be a calculator more targeted at engineers.
For something smaller, there's the Swissmicros DM42. That one is definitely an engineers tool, but it's exclusively RPN. It's basically a super modern HP 42s with a huge, georgeous screen and a USB interface (and a modern ARM MCU). The software is based on the excellent Free42 project.
Everything can be done better and faster in a cas on a laptop.
Everything except actually typing in the problem. A good specialized keyboard and input method (RPN) will always beat QWERTY, especially one that doesn't even have a number pad.
Calculators are a relic from a bygone era, kept in use only by regulations and a captured market.
Uh, no. I often find myself picking up a calculator rather than opening up Mathematica to do a lot of calculations.
They are like mathematica, but don't suck.
Too bad. There's always https://www.swissmicros.com/
The TI graphing calculators exist solely to support the testing regime, which serves no pedagogic purpose.
Granted, I own a calculator -- $10 Casio solar -- but I grew up with one, and it's just easy to grab and use, especially in the workshop or lab. I also still have an analog watch. But there's no reason to impose my old habits on the young generation.
Often a CAS isn't even that useful anyway, they're still pretty shit for any sort of complicated symbolic calculations. As a simple example, even doing basic vector calculus in Mathematica is clunky and barely usable.
When it gets to Tensor Calculus though it’s literally back to the blackboard to cry tears of blood.
Edit: the same applies to tensors. Mathematica is actually pretty elegant for working with concrete tensors IMO, but kinda sucks for symbolic manipulation. Not that it's an easy problem to solve. It's like that with pretty much every CAS and I think it will be a while time before we have a good grip on how to do such things with a computer.
Out of the box, there are Python scripts for calculating factorials, generating visual representations of Mandelbrot fractals, and finding roots of polynomials. On the NumWorks workshop, there are dozens of user-contributed scripts that perform various interesting functions and calculations. They've built a great open-source community, and the speed of their team in responding to issues and pull requests on Github is impressive.
Secondly, as someone who had to use various TI calculators in school, trying to get TI Connect software to work was a huge pain. NumWorks lets you install software patches and transfer scripts directly from Chrome, with a one-time driver installation. Not having to deal with bloated and finnicky calculator connection software has been very enjoyable.
If I'm in the field and need to perform some calculations, I either use my phone (for simple calculations) or my $17 Casio statistics calculator.
As a risk assessor and environmental scientist, I have NEVER needed anything more than these.
I think the days where engineers, scientists and students shared the same calculators are gone.
But what's usually not even on people's radar is whether the calculator can handle units. The line of HP calculators that ended with the HP 50g had the most useful system I've seen for computation on quantities with units. It serves both as a type checking safety feature and provides automatic conversion. TI's top graphing calculators have had similar functionality since at least the TI-89/92 generation, but (as usual) without a good user interface to make it worth using. The NumWorks calculator does not appear to have any capability for unit conversions, let alone carrying units throughout calculations.
> $99.99
This is in-line with, or slightly above, other players in the market (e.g. TI, Casio). I'd love to see someone challenge them in this space with something that's like $25. I can get a cheap $10 scientific calculator that does 60% of the same things for $10, so it really seems like there is a spot here for a lower price point. Especially since the hardware is so "old".
> 20+ hours of use on a single charge
A couple hundred hours would be nice. The benefit of a normal calculator is that it works without charging really being a thing that most people have to worry about.
I'd agree a good old-fashioned set of AAA batteries like my old TI would've been a better choice though, everyone's been pushing rechargeable batteries, but beyond the need for recharging regularly, they degrade over time and are often a pain to replace.
This is almost certainly due to using what looks like either a transmissive LCD or an OLED display, which require a lot of power.
Much of the time a calculator is glanced at while doing math on paper or sitting idle while waiting for the next input. A 0-energy display would be ideal for this. It'd be interesting to see a breakdown of energy and energy consumption by part on a calculator.