TIWiFiModem: Take your TI-83 Plus online [video] | Hacker News Reader

TIWiFiModem: Take your TI-83 Plus online [video]

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48 pointsrubycon729 comments

Wow, super impressive and cool. He makes it look so easy, but I know from personal experience it's not. He's got some real patience, persistence, and expertise to produce such a smooth and polished demonstration. The minimap navigation looks highly useful given the low resolution.

Story time: Back in highschool, I downloaded and printed TI-82 source code for a version of DOOM. The thing is, I had no money to acquire the requisite serial cable, nor know-how about how to connect it to a Mac to load anything. A Macintosh Performa 550 was the only computer I had access to, and possibly it wasn't even supported by TI at the time (almost nothing I really wanted was! The chronic limitations did encourage me to become really proficient with HyperCard, though).

I carefully entered the 45 pages of source code into the calculator, double checked it, and guess what happened next? -- it didn't work! I was pretty disappointed but not entirely surprised. Eventually, without a path forward, I abandoned the quest.

Afterthought: Is there a similar way to get an original PalmPilot onto Wi-Fi and the Internet?

Edit: Apparently the answer is "yes", and no ESP32 hacking required. https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/palm-and-treo/059610054....

I had a similar problem with the cable for the HP 48. However, in this case it turned out that the serial pinout was known and a connector could be made out of a PC motherboard connector (for speakers, etc.) plus a cut-up RS232 cable. It was nice to be able to download stuff into my calculator using a PC serial transfer program (I forget the protocol.)

I also made a cable for my HP 48SX. I also used individual female pins from some other connector, soldered the wires to them and then I molded an epoxy "body" on top of them while they were plugged into the calculator (talk about living on the edge).

I still have the calculator and the cable. For some time the calculator had some display issues after being accidentally dropped but I powered it up a few months back and it seems to have fixed itself. I recall how much I wanted to get one back in the day and how much fun it was.

You should also check out his blog post about it: http://benryves.com/journal/3763186

6MHz Z80, 32k RAM, 96x64 display. A lot of IoT devices have far more computing power than that, including the embedded CPU in the modem.

Personally I'm waiting for someone to make an LLM in TI BASIC

They did - Gpt4All was ported to a TI-86 (saw on Twitter)

Honestly I thought it was bullshit

All LLM's are bullshit, but sometimes its passable bullshit.

A video by benryves that looks at an ESP8266-based WiFi "modem" for TI graphing calculators and how it can be used to connect a calculator to the Internet.

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