DM32 – a modern take on the HP-32SII calculator | Hacker News Reader

DM32 – a modern take on the HP-32SII calculator

swissmicros.com

57 pointsbosveld37 comments

Did the Berkeley Graphics (https://berkeleygraphics.com) guy design their website? I mean that in a good way.

Swissmicro is noobish but Berkeley graphics is super neat to me.

I find these light blockish ui relaxing (more than flat, whitespace recent ones ironically)

I abhor flat UIs. Our brain has all of these wonderful ways of inferring depth from a flat image, and modern UI design seems to be to avoid using those affordances at all costs. I find it particularly ironic that the flat UIs seemed to be taking over at about the same time that stereoscopy was at a peak in its hype...

SwissMicros is the first project listed on the Berkeley Graphics website, so I'd say yes.

Hah! So it is. I don't know how I completely overlooked that.

I hope these people do something similar for the hp48 or 50 series, though I understand it's a big undertaking. I'd be the first person to buy it.

Me, too. My two HP48s are finally starting to fail after 30 years of use.

I used an HP-41 for years which finally died. I was really tempted to buy the equivalent from these folks but couldn't justify it given that I use a physical calculator once in a blue moon (and have a good HP-41 app on my iPhone).

I love my 41CX+ app.

FWIW, the best RPN caclulator app I've seen (no Android, just iPhone, sadly...) is the MathU RPN from CreativeCreek. Not only does it successfully combine the scientific, digital, and financial capabilities of the HP 10-series (12c, 15c, 16c) into one calculator, it's also one of the very few RPN apps that really gets the look and feel of HP's keyboard/UI design right. This app is literally the biggest thing still tying me to Apple's iOS, which I've finally decided I'm done with, but I really don't want to give up this app - it's one of only two I've ever paid for.

Droid48[0] exists and is basically perfect, as far as a touch screen calculator goes.

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.ab.x48&hl=...

I'm happy one can buy a mighty 4-stack RPN calculator today new. Greedily, I wish they had recreated the 32S instead, as it had a single Gold function key and far less busy silk screening. I say this as a former owner of a 32SII.

https://www.hpmuseum.org/32s.jpg

Personally I'm hoping for an HP48G or HP50G clone. I still use my 50g and it's great.

There's the HP Prime

Prime is a completely different product, because it's aimed at a completely different target group: students, not engineers.

Perhaps, but it doesn't mean that it's not the greatest for engineers, of does it? I've used a little bit of both and I don't see myself using anything but a prime nowadays. The new licensee (after HP completely dropped the calculators business 3 years ago or so) just put out a new os version, and there are hopes that another one soon brings up the CAS to a recent version of giac/xcas, which is completely unmatched in this field/market.

To be frank, I had the HP-48SX, donated it and have gone back to my trust HP-15C (or reissues). For anything more sophisticated, I use a CAS on a computer, like SymPy/Mathics or inside Jupyter.

HP48GX with a sizeable readable font.

I'm the opposite on this, I like more labeled functions directly reachable with function buttons and less menu scrolling :)

SwissMicros should really do the WP-34s imho:

https://commerce.hpcalc.org/images/34s-angle-medium.jpg

32S didn't use menu scrolling though.

This page at least mentions a menu system:

https://www.hpmuseum.org/hp32s.htm

I still have (and use) an HP-15c from the mid-80s. I know it's nostalgic, but you had to have lived it to appreciate the power these had/have--and the fun of manually programming stacks. I've owned a 32S and many others over the years, but this one has stuck.

Me too and ... it's still working on the factory batteries!

There are many reasons to love the HP calcs, but I think the keyboard doesn't get enough praise. I have never found another calculator as satisfying to use. I heard from owners of the Swiss that it's not quite as good.

Me three. The reason why those calculators last so long is their use of silicon on sapphire technology.

FYI the company that took over the HP Calculator business is releasing a "HP-15C Collector's Edition" that fixes the HP-15C Limited Edition's bugs, but it's a limited edition as well so if you want one you'd better preorder. It won't have the amazing battery life of the original, but it will be orders of magnitude faster, and reports say build quality is good, unlike newer HPs.

I heard a (possibly apocryphal) story that the 1XC series calculators were specified to only need a battery change every N days, and the engineers interpreted that as working while being on 24/7 for N days. Battery life in them is so absurd, I suspect that shelf-life of the button cells may come into play as much as the drain that the calculator itself uses.

The batteries in my wife's 12c have only been replaced two or three times since she bought it in college in 1984! She worked as a commercial real estate appraiser for many years, using it daily. A few years back, she started a new job doing something similar, so it's back in use again, good as new.

I fully expect it to outlive both of us - due to HP's excellent dual-shot key molding that embeds the key legends into the keys themselves, it looks nearly new less a few scratches and dings imposed by the real world. This may have been one of the last times a product was truly designed to last indefinitely. And yeah, I suspect self-discharge of the batteries is at least on par with the actual power usage of the calculator...

I keep looking to see if they have the credit card ones back in stock, but they never seem to.

A few weeks ago I added an "rpncalc" command to my CLI "swiss army toothpick" program ( https://github.com/linsomniac/toothpyk ): "pyk rc 86500,24/365x" (x == * == multiply).

On the one hand I love the HP calculators and have leaned on them heavily in the distant past. On the other hand I like having a clean desktop (3d printing some under desk drawers at this moment).

When I was in college, my physics professor brought back a credit card sized calculator, with scientific functions, from a trip to Japan. I was super envious. My Sharp was small enough to be portable, but nothing like how small it could be.

This is interesting; the display can show the whole stack (my daily driver, a 35s has only 2 lines, and the 32SII only has one). Keyboard looks fairly similar to a 32SII in layout; no arrow-keys like the 35s.

Given that it takes only a single battery, I suppose it stores programs in non-volatile memory rather than SRAM (my 35s has two batteries and you need to change them one-at-a-time to not erase the memory).

Keyboard layout is identical to 32SII, save for the orange-shifted SETUP above the ON key and an extra top row of blank keys, presumably for some kind of menu functions. Interesting indeed. The 32SII's forte has always been pure number crunching, with most functions reachable with a couple of keypresses. It had a rather limited program memory, which this version can rectify.

Having a single battery shouldn't preclude SRAM storage; there could be a small capacitor capable of preserving the contents for several minutes.

The 128 bit arithmetic part is really interesting. I wonder whether they used libquadmath and whether they needed to implement any extra funcitons beyond what’s available there.

My favorite thing on the TI SR-50 was to calculate 69! ... It was the largest number that the 2-digit exponent could hold and also the slowest calculation. I also discovered the 1 hidden digit of precision (13 digits) by subtracting know digits of pi away from the pi constant to reveal the invisible digit in scientific notation ...

besides slightly different keymap, what are the main differences between this and DM42 (or DM41X)?

They are emulating different HP calculators. The DM42 is a HP-42S clone, while the OP is a HP-32SII.

As far as I can tell, the build quality is the same: fully metallic enclosure with printed keys unlike the double-injection molded ones on the HP originals. The DM41X was released with just one font, one emulating the segmented 'font' of the HP41. This one appears to have improved that by allowing different, easier to read fonts.

In somewhat related news, HP is releasing reedition of HP-15C this summer.

Thank you for the news! I missed out last time the re-released it.

You can preorder now:

https://www.hpmuseum.org/forum/thread-19886.html

Update: I tried to order and failed. I’ll be watching for a US-based distributor though because I definitely want one.

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