Casio fx-CG50 calculator comes with Python built-in | Hacker News Reader

Casio fx-CG50 calculator comes with Python built-in

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123 pointsmiohtama150 comments

Re the subscription, it’s difficult to see how this is a step forward. Do computers (or, mobile phones & tablets) not exist?

It’s sad, but Casio’s been “s*tifying” their calculators over the past year.

Their 2023 calculators for high school are a particular highlight[1]: less buttons, more menus, more key presses for common operations. Sadly Casio are hugely dominant in many markets.

[1] https://b28mathstutor.co.uk/the-new-casio-classwiz-cw-calcul...

The reason is admission of calculators to exams in schools and universities. Casio and Texas Instruments basically have a cartel that dominates this market. Often one of these calculators is required.

Wouldn't it be easy to have a exams without calculators? Or on dumb terminals that only have basic apps like calculators on them?

Where I grew up, exams disallowed any calculators or any kind of other electronic devices. From what I see, using calculators at exams is mostly an American thing.

I think the chance that the person creating the "dumb" terminal is more competent at locking down the system than students are at breaking out of the "dumb" terminal is low. I work at a bank, and they have layers and layers of lockdowns for employees that take a couple of minutes to defeat with almost no skill. I doubt schools will do better.

What's there to break out of a Windows XP PC without network connectivity?

XP has vbscript in the command line, giving you more processing power than a standard calculator... Not that people would have time to code, but maybe there could be an advantage to be had. A custom Linux build would be easier to lock down, I think.

That's what human proctors/supervisors are there for at exams.

Exams problems are designed to make use of only basic scientific calculator features, I doubt you have the need, or the time, to start sneakily writing VB scripts to try to gain an edge, while the proctors are not looking.

If someone is using Windows XP in any official capacity in 2023 they should be summarily terminated for gross negligence and sued for damages.

It was just an example of how exams that required calculation aids were in my school back in late 2000s.

Feel free to adapt it to modern days but the concept stays the same.

The GRE has been on computer terminals since forever (at least it was when I took it in 2012). Lots of standardized testing is.

If you don't include WiFi hardware, and don't plug in an Ethernet cable, cheating would be extremely difficult to say the least.

What sort of "defeat" are you taking about?

Most exams now have an on-screen calculator and do not allow physical calculators.

I think it's worth keeping in mind that HN is visited by international audience, "most exams" will be clearer with geographical attribution. I guess most exams worldwide are pen-and-paper (which is not necessary bad, btw)

They’re definitely used in the UK gcse and A level exams.

We had two written. One with and one without. It’s different types of problems you can solve.

Graphing calculators have a lot of features, and since students also use them during lessons it would be very difficult to suddenly use an entirely different interface during exams.

In the Netherlands we also had to have calculators during exams, because some questions just need a calculator to be solved. Especially for stuff like calculus plotting graphs is really useful.

I imagine some engineering exams would be very-hard to do without them, if you want to keep realistic the values and the complexity. You don't want people to waste the time on crunching large decimal numbers and solving trigonometry, it would take away from the exam itself.

It depends on the subject. Here in the UK calculators are absolutely expected in most STEM exams for high school and university.

For a trig exam for example if you don't allow calculators you are very limited in terms of what you can do. You could do a lot of trig identities etc but all the problems with a concrete answer would have to boil down to some sort of 30/60/90 or 45/45/90 right triangle. It's not reasonable to expect people to be able to calculate exponents and logarithms in their heads either beyond very simple integer bases and small powers. Forget about natural logs for instance. Likewise anything which depends on trig, exponents, logs etc eg converting rectangular complex coordinates to polar, adding vectors fitting any kind of exponential model, etc.

For a stats exam calculating things like standard deviation etc are almost unbearably tedious with a calculator let alone without, but you do need to be able to demonstrate you can do it.

Many countries allow calculators, even at board exams held for 15/16 year olds.

I didn’t need a very advanced scientific calculator, in the exam it was mostly used as a replacement for log tables (remember those?).

Most countries are not like US, it can be any calculator.

The reason being a calculator instead of phones/tablets, is cheating, and programable calculators are already on the edge in some exams.

In the Netherlands in high school I also had to have either a Casio or TI calculator.

For simple maths a normal calculator is good enough, but you need a graphing calculator for more advanced math.

> Most countries are not like US, it can be any calculator.

In my experience it's either been "no device at all", or "any calculator, but really only any calculator from this list".

> programable calculators are already on the edge in some exams

Flashback to 2 decades ago where I'd scan and OCR large parts of text then copied them onto my Casio calculator over the serial port it had (on a mini jack even, IIRC). Didn't have a lot of memory, but enough, especially after doing simple find/replace operations like replacing all 'the' with 't', 'and' with 'a' and so on.

I study in India and we are required to use a casio calculator. The board that I study in is also used in multiple other countries and recommends only casio watches.

I really don't understand why they allow calculators that complex. I got a math degree in a place where only a non-programmable calculator was allowed

I still have my 1980s/90s Casios which work well and they’re not hard to find on the market. My newish HP35 is great for newer stuff. I have considered buying a new Casio but this postmodern capitalist strategy to make everything an OpEx utility is really making me thankful that most people aren’t allowed to own guns.

What's the actual use case for these graphing calculators? Forget about the fact that smartphones make them obsolete and they're pretty much only used today in standardized test scenarios where you can't have a smartphone - what was the use case back in the 1990s?

I was born in 1987 and I went through AP classes and an EECS degree at MIT and I never had a need to graph a function on my calculator.

What's the actual use case for these graphing calculators?

There really isn't one, at least not when you have a PC close at hand that can run a Python prompt (or other language of choice that offers easy access to graphing tools).

So, maybe if you're a student and need a dedicated calculator for class. That's about it.

The school says a calculator is required, and you go out and buy one for your kid. Some states require schools to provide any required materials, and maybe those states don't require graphing calculators.

Schools in my area also have a set of calculators for kids in the class to checkout if they don’t have one.

When I was in high school in Germany in the 2000's, IIRC there were 3 different mathematics curricula taught simultaneously in my state.

This would depend on the school, but sometimes also on the specific class (major vs. minor).

I just looked it up and it still seems to be valid:

- 1) Standard scientific calculators: Calculators without any graphing or persistent memory. Algebra exams would test your written calculation steps (e.g. getting to the derivative of a function), and how well you are able to translate functions to graphs.

Example question: "We are building an Autobahn that is defined by the function X. Please give the function of the tangent that merges into it smoothly at point Y. Make a graph of both."

- 2) Graphing calculators, but not programmable and not able to do derivatives. Tests were mostly about complex derivatives.

Example question: "Here’s function X. Please give derivates I and II if this function."

- 3) Programmable graphing calculators. More exotic theoretical and conceptual stuff where the actual calculation was the easy part.

Example question: "Here’s a complex body with some sides defined by functions. Calculate the volume. How would it change if function X was swapped for function Y?"

(Caveat: example questions are from the best of my memory at different grades in school, so things might be more similar in reality)

I was lucky to experience all three streams.

It wasn’t that one was objectively harder than the other, but more that the challenges were different.

The best thing about the programmable calculators was, though, that you could put Breakout or Space Invaders on them.

Then it was for every other type of calculation aside from graphs, if you didn't need that.

Now, it's a racket.

never had a need to graph a function on my calculator

Some people are more 'visual' thinkers. I've always found that plotting a function or a system of equations or whatever I was working on to be the easiest way to understand what was actually going on. Ever since I got a graphing calculator in high school, I used the graphics and plotting features all the time to help visualize math problems.

They are mostly still around because you can't take Excel or smartphones into exams.

But quite frankly they are handy to have around if you want to do a trivial analysis or find some roots. And the recentish ones have input methodologies and functionality that is not present on any smartphone app.

Still my go-to for "I need to get an answer to a problem quickly". I dabble with electronics regularly and they are very handy for that too.

I'm in agreement, the UK doesn't use these.

They seem more suited to engineering where the equations you get might exceed the mathematical ability of students to solve them, or the maths is irrelevant to the engineering problem and you just want an answer within a few decimal places.

If I were a teacher I would worry that eg students ask the calculator to solve, get 7/2 and use that as a reminder of the technique to symbolically solve the problem.

> If I were a teacher I would worry that eg students ask the calculator to solve, get 7/2 and use that as a reminder of the technique to symbolically solve the problem.

A terrible fate indeed. A student using their head for thinking? Can’t let that happen.

I own one of these

Primary use case is I like having the history there on the screen, that persists between power cycles, and the backlit screen. Being able to graph stuff is neat but unused by me. Also the casio graphing calculators have spreadsheet functionality now, which is nice for crunching a couple of variables to find the correct set that arrives you at the target number.

It's also way more durable than my smart phone and I can leave it in the garage for weeks and weeks next to the drill press and it's still there with the last 20+ calculations I did on it, when I get back.

You'd be surprised at how many calculator apps on smartphones just use floating point and thus get many calculations completely wrong.

I had a graphing calculator for high school maths in the UK in the early 1990s. For me the main use case turned out to be "much better user interface than a plain old calculator" -- you got a screen that was big enough to show you what you were typing as you went along plus some of the previous things you'd calculated, plus a backspace button. Plus at the time it was a neat geeky toy that I could persuade my parents to buy for me :-) I wrote a few little programs in the not-very-powerful-or-flexible script language it used, and I probably did a little drawing of graphs just because it was there, but just having the bigger screen was the killer feature.

We used them in 10th grade "advanced" math (Canada, I think the equivalent in the US would be AP?). TI-80plus in the early 00's. We didn't have laptops in classes.

Main use case was quadratic equations, which were a significant part of the class. We could plot them to get an intuition of the effect of the parameters. Plot them to visualize the zeros (or the absence of zeros), or the minima/maxima to get intuition on those. Same for finding intersection points of a quadratic function and a line, or two quadratics. We also programmed the quadratic formula in it, to get faster results instead of typing it out each time.

Other parts of the class were trig and stats, from what I remember I don't think we used the graphing/programming much in these parts.

If my smartphone had good physical buttons I would agree with you.

A remaining use case is that dedicated physical devices provide dedicated contexts that benefit human memory. If you forgot why you picked up a calculator obviously the search space is obviously smaller (you picked it up to check or visualize some math) and has a discrete context (this is a math device connected to math thoughts in generally) decreasing the "distance" between thoughts even in the search space. If you forgot where you just checked or visualized some math, you have a physical object to be the most likely thing to remember for you.

If you go to open an app on a single device that you do everything on and get lost along the way you have a lot fewer breadcrumbs.

It's probably not a large market that still prefers the dedicated device, but there are definitely users I know who do if for no other reason than mental focus.

Slightly off topic but you can unofficially program these in C/C++ and make things like this Minecraft clone I’ve been working on: https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1135251023435415633...

nice, this is super cool. Does it run as fast on the real calculator?

Thanks, it runs at 14-20fps depending on the scene but you can overclock the calculator to get it to a solid 20fps like in the video (or more but that makes you move too fast)

I also made a Minecraft clone for a graphical calculator (https://github.com/Vogtinator/crafti), but the TI nspire has more resources available (esp. RAM) than the CG50.

I'm wondering how you do rendering: Usual rasterization per scanline per triangle or some other technique (s buffers)? Depth sorting or Z buffer? Any other tricks?

Hello, I've seen Crafti, it looks a lot more complete than mine.

The rendering is based on the triangle renderer in https://gitea.planet-casio.com/Lephenixnoir/Azur which renders in fragments to the fast on chip memory so it isn't bottlenecked by the slow main RAM, but I customised it to add textures etc. It's using barycentric coordinates over a bounding box which is probably not as fast as scanline rendering but I can try to make it use scanlines at some point.I'm also using parts of https://codeberg.org/drummyfish/small3dlib. It's using depth sorting which works fine for a simple voxel world like this but if I add things like entities and non-full blocks that might complicate things. Also, to speed things up it uses affine texture mapping (which I think yours uses too?) but splits the triangles when they get close to reduce the distortion. The splitting is causing the seams in the video, I can probably improve it by having sub-pixel precision in the triangle rendering or something

> The rendering is based on the triangle renderer in https://gitea.planet-casio.com/Lephenixnoir/Azur which renders in fragments to the fast on chip memory so it isn't bottlenecked by the slow main RAM, but I customised it to add textures etc. It's using barycentric coordinates over a bounding box which is probably not as fast as scanline rendering but I can try to make it use scanlines at some point.

Ok, interesting. Does it use barycentric coordinates for texturing only or also for single color triangles? I see that the tree is not textured and I wonder whether that's to save texture memory or to use scanline rendering.

> It's using depth sorting which works fine for a simple voxel world like this but if I add things like entities and non-full blocks that might complicate things.

It might, but it should still work fine as long as there's no unusual geometry, like overlapping itself. Depending on how you sort everything, freely moving entities might be complex but I don't think non-full blocks are much of an issue.

> Also, to speed things up it uses affine texture mapping (which I think yours uses too?) but splits the triangles when they get close to reduce the distortion.

Yep. I didn't bother with splitting up triangles (or even using partial Z based interpolation like Quake), as I don't think it's that bad of an issue.

Initially I planned for the game to be flat shaded and added textures as an experiment, then realised the performance wasn't as horrible as I expected, so it's mostly just a leftover from that. I did end up writing a scanline renderer for the flat shaded triangles, I think for those the bottleneck was transforming the vertices though.

Maybe I can deal with z-sorting entities by splitting them on voxel boundaries, and I guess dividing them again at any boundaries within non-full blocks (is this similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_space_partitioning?)

For the affine texture splitting, as far as I can tell your game is more focused on creative mode/building whereas I might also want to add a survival mode so for that you're more likely to be up close to the blocks (e.g. in thin underground tunnels) and then the artifacts get much worse so I guess it matters more for me.

The code is at https://github.com/Heath123/minecraft-casio if you want to look at it (textures are in a branch) but it is quite messy

> Initially I planned for the game to be flat shaded and added textures as an experiment, then realised the performance wasn't as horrible as I expected,

Heh, same!

> so it's mostly just a leftover from that. I did end up writing a scanline renderer for the flat shaded triangles, I think for those the bottleneck was transforming the vertices though.

IME vertex transformation is not expensive at all, compared to actually drawing on screen, at least if there is HW support for multiplication. Optimizations like merging identical block faces next to each other also reduce the total number of vertices, but this makes the texture distortions more apparent.

> Maybe I can deal with z-sorting entities by splitting them on voxel boundaries, and I guess dividing them again at any boundaries within non-full blocks (is this similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_space_partitioning?)

Kind of, yeah. With the structure of blocks in a chunk there is basically already a layer of partitioning that can be used, though it might not help sorting that much. Is there enough RAM for a Z buffer? If so, it might just be fast enough...

> For the affine texture splitting, as far as I can tell your game is more focused on creative mode/building whereas I might also want to add a survival mode so for that you're more likely to be up close to the blocks (e.g. in thin underground tunnels) and then the artifacts get much worse so I guess it matters more for me.

I never really bothered with that also because in tunnels/caves there is a bigger issue: There is no hidden surface elimination, which results in overdraw and due to the rather low effective fillrate in FPS drops. I couldn't come up with a good way to implement that properly without hurting performance itself.

> The code is at https://github.com/Heath123/minecraft-casio if you want to look at it (textures are in a branch) but it is quite messy

I had a look, it's really not. The asm is also readable. Is it currently memory or CPU bound?

In my opinion, peak calculator was Hp 11c https://www.hpmuseum.org/hp11c.htm

After that nothing significant was added.

Oh! I see now that they started manufacturing 15c again in 2023! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-15C

Time to resurrect the hp-01a https://www.hpmuseum.org/hp01.htm

No, the 28s was the peak. Showing the stack is a huge ui win.

Good point, I have owned both and still use my 28s and look dearly upon it when I bring it up (and my younger colleagues smile at me like - well you know the type of smile)

The details may be discussed (indefinetely). There may even be earlier versions than 11c that has the similar feature set but the longevity of the model and the build quality of the model says it all i think.

You’ve obviously never used an HP 48GX. An RPN graphing calculator, that actually had a real usable programming language onboard, and included communications (serial and IR) and expandability, in 1993? And it could function as a TV remote to boot?

I’d still use mine today if I hadn’t accidentally smashed the screen. I bought a 49G+ as a replacement to use in college, but it just… wasn’t as good. Despite theoretically being much more powerful and having more features, it felt like plasticky garbage and was never really a joy to use the same way the 48 was.

Yeah but then you may as well use a computer. The acid test here - do they still sell 48gx?

Technically they dont sell 11c anymore but 15c looks similar enough count as the same to me (someone who has the time to read the fine print may correct me).

They sell the HP prime, which is in many ways an evolution the the 48GX, and for some markets, they still sell the 50G, which is even closer to the 48.

All of them are fantastic. And once on RPN, it's hard to go back.

You couldn’t use a computer on standardized testing. The HP48 series had so much built-in functionality that they arguably shouldn’t have been allowed. For myself, a perennially shitty and unmotivated math student in high school, the SAT was really a test of how quickly I could use my HP48—and I practically aced it. The calculator was just that good.

As mentioned in another reply, HP does still sell a successor to the HP48 series. But regardless, I don’t think determining the quality of a calculator based on the business decisions of a company known for its persistently and astonishingly terrible corporate choices really makes a whole lot of sense…

Had a 48G+, was dog slow. There were 3rd party replacements for the main screen (stack) written that were way faster. But yeah it was a delight to use otherwise esp compared to TI-xx

Dismayed to learn that it's now virtually impossible to obtain an RPN calculator of any sort. Swiss Micros make HP clones but for the more casual user their prices are pretty prohibitive when compared to how 'mainstream' calculator prices have tumbled.

When I dont have my hp 28s with me I use realcalc on my android phone.

But yeah it is not the same thing obviously.

RPN rules for sure.

Isn’t the HP35 around for about €50?

EDIT: OMFG no and look at the prices

The 15C is a collector's edition. It's not going to be in production for long. I bought one and they people who made it (Moravia) did a great job.

HP15C is amazing but so is the HP42S[1] and HP35S, with the 42S in particular considered by some people to be the best scientific calculator ever made. I have an HP35S which is great. I also have a swiss micros DM42[2] which is an absolutely fantastic calculator based on the Free42[3] opensource emulator. It's much more powerful than the HP42S while remaining 100% compatible[4]. The only downside is the keys are quite a lot stiffer than the HP42S.

For finance specifically the HP12C is the mac daddy. I have two of them and they're completely fantastic. They took me through an 8 year finance career and even though they are 20 years old now they are both still on their original battery.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-42S

[2] https://www.swissmicros.com/product/dm42

[3] https://thomasokken.com/free42/

[4] The processor is much much more powerful and it has 1000s of times the memory and essentially unlimited stack space. The instructionset is slightly expanded in a few useful and thoughtful ways. And it has a USB connection so you can upload and download. But original HP42 programs run on it unaltered.

I think it’s micropython. Not a bad thing, of course. Every time I see them at Walmart I’m tempted to buy one. But have no use for it.

Yes, it's micropython 1.9.4

Interesting, so it seems micropython 1.9.4 targets Python 3.4. Not that one'd use the calculator for any common Python development, but it's a shame since most Python libraries target at least Python 3.6.

>but it's a shame since most Python libraries target at least Python 3.6.

Why would that matter? Would Micropython be able to run "most Python libraries" anyway?

Pure python ones, yes.

Even pure python ones are not all usable, as "it includes a subset of the standard library" (so a pure python library that uses some standard library API not in the subset wont be usable).

Does python have many polyfills available, like javascript does?

I'm sure you'd run out of space before too long, but it'd probably improve usability.

That's _very_ old; v1.9.4 was released May 2018...

Anything that qualifies as “very old” after a mere five years arguably shouldn’t be made part of a physical appliance anyway. That being said, I would disagree with that qualification here.

I use a Python REPL on the desktop or Termux to do all my calculations.

Python comes with Casio fx-CG50 calculator built-in.

How did they get the calculator in Python? Is it an emulator? Maybe you meant to say it the other way around.

I think he just means it comes with all the functions of the calculator, that there's nothing the calculator can do that python can't

I think the point is that anything the calculator can do, Python can do (and more obviously). Perhaps with a bit more difficulty, at least in the Termux case.

Maybe using iPython (or even jupyter) could be useful here.

A screenshot from the manual

https://twitter.com/moo9000/status/1718757628006834221

>Approximate battery life (hours) : 140 (AAA-size alkaline batteries), 85 (nickel-metal hydride batteries) Assuming 5 minutes calculation and 55 minutes display per hour

A huge downgrade from classic calculators with non-retro-illuminated screens, such as the venerable m68k-based TI-89.

If you've ever used one it's a massive upgrade on display quality over everything including the TI89.

I would hope it is, if it drinks battery instead of sipping.

But I got no real complaints about my HP50g, TI-86, TI-89 or v200 displays in the first place.

Outside of the artificially restricted world of education, it's hard to think of a use for a physical calculator that would not be better accomplished with a phone, tablet, or laptop.

I find one very handy when doing carpentry or other physical practices that require on-the-fly minor adaptations of designs as you build.

I have never used a phone calculator I didn’t hate

This is a bit ironic, but have you tried the Numworks simulator app or any of its forks.

I usually have excel sheets or python/matlab scripts. However, this simulator felt self-consistent enough to develop muscle memory for quick back-of-the-envelope work.

https://github.com/UpsilonNumworks/Upsilon

https://www.numworks.com/simulator/download/

I love the Free42 app. The Plus42 app is also great, but the buttons are too small on my 5" phone screen.

JRPN15C and JRPN16C are also awesome, even more so in landscape mode.

I love free42 as well. Mostly as a tribute to the HP42S that got me through engineering school 30 odd yrs ago. The RPN muscle memory never completely went away.

Desmos

HIPER is the best one I have found. Not having been railroaded into HP calculators by the American education system, and thus not being very familiar with them, I've always found the HP clones a bit clunky on phones. But I still much prefer the RPN option.

The free version does have an ad banner, which I have to tolerate although I paid for it ages ago because this phone doesn't have Google play on it.

A unit-aware calculator is what I really crave, however, and I keep going back to Google for that which is pretty shameful. E.g. (1GWh/ 1 year)/2 km^2 in W/cm^2

> Not having been railroaded into HP calculators by the American education system

Did you mean TI calculators? I have never seen anyone use an HP calculator in the American education system, much less one being required.

Oh yes. Derp! No one really uses graphic calculators in UK schools, so they're all the same to me to me to be honest. A £10 Casio was all that was ever needed at school, and I didn't need one at university either. So I never got any kind of deep connection with any model in the way that some people seem to live and breathe their favourite models.

A sad side effect of this is few get suckered into accidentally learning to write software by trying to pay games in their maths lessons.

It depends. Of course a phone is mostly just with you, it still has for ex. the lock screen. It is also more easy and faster to tip on real buttons. If you just have to calculate once a year something, yes, just go with the phone. But all guys I know have a calculator on there working place.

What kind of work is it? One where you stand at a desk with a computer or on a bench or sales counter?

Industrie automation / plc programming / electro or mechanic cad

I recently bought a Casio FX991ES Plus 2nd Edition (...) Having real buttons, a selection of memories, support for fractions and hrs/min/secs, and some very basic automation has been really nice - much better for simple jobs than the MacOS calculator.

Calculated Industries make a range of calculators designed for specific industries and trades, offered as both phone apps and as physical calculators. The physical option is generally superior IMO - they're rugged, the battery lasts forever and hardware buttons are just faster, particularly if you've got wet, dirty or gloved hands. A pocket calculator is not a substitute for Excel or CAD/CAM, but it's often a more appropriate tool if you just need to make a couple of quick calculations.

https://www.calculated.com/

Dedicated tools can have better useability. Like physical buttons, in the case of pocket calculators.

True, but the amount of people that need a calculator while not at a computer is dwindling. I can imagine it's still a thing in manufacturing though.

I sometimes prefer using a pocket calculator even when I’m at a computer, because I can use it more intuitively. A software calculator app has some upsides, but also some downsides. One isn’t strictly better than the other.

If anyone is calculator shopping check out the Numworks, it’s a glorious little thing (and can be hacked with apps, Python, and custom firmware — the firmware part is only on older versions). It’s definitely worth checking out, plus it’s less expensive than most alternatives and easier to use. It can even emulate a TI (someone made an app for it). My only complaint is that it is yet to support different bases, but I suppose you could use Python for that.

Of course it has a subscription. I’m glad PCs were already invented.

I read that as being a subscription to lesson-planning software for teachers, not for the calculator itself.

can confirm that - my child has one - no subscription needed for the calculator

User maven29 already mentioned the NumWorks open source calculator, and the new OS fork, but here is a video to better appreciate some of the features:

- https://youtu.be/UnethgugvPA

- https://youtu.be/GHWcLdQnfqI

Online emulator that runs in your browser: https://getupsilon.web.app/simulator

Which also runs Python https://www.numworks.com/calculator/apps/python/

This Casio calculator from the 1980s supported Basic programming language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW_BH7D45dE

I have a Tandy PC-8 from high school which was apparently made by Sharp and also runs BASIC:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_Pocket_Computer

Thanks

Wonder if they would still work, i.e. battery available, etc. I think I used a similar one back in the day to learn BASIC. Had fun with it, including programming graphics.

Every 80s calculator that I used used the batteries that are still commonly available, CR2032 mostly, but some CR2025 and such as well.

The hard to find batteries (not impossible) tend to be the wierd voltage batteries that cameras mostly used for light metering.

Thanks.

This kind of Casio calculators were quite common in Engineering degrees across Portuguese universities, all the way up to the last model 880-P.

For us, Casio ruled, there weren't that many TI or HP calculators around.

Why aren't any ESP32+eink calculators out there?

There are the SwissMicros which have an STM32 and a very nice LCD. Which is perhaps slightly hungrier than e-ink, but looks much nicer especially when refreshing. Calculators benefit from very, very fast response times to keypresses and e-ink slows it down (e.g. when typing into an ereader).

Like the HP Prime? Since mobile phones and graph calculators are ptactically the same size I would prefer a smaller calculator with a form factor difference such as financial calculators.

Graphing calculators are so cool! One of the largest contrasts between "Wow that's cool" and "I have literally no use for any of this" in any consumer gadget.

I still want to see a nice app capable calculator OS for the Cardputer though. Seems ideal for a foss calculator.

Perhaps there's something we've overlooked, like real time sync with a CAD app, to make them relevant IRL!

This is not unique/new: TI has a line of calculators with Python https://education.ti.com/en/products/calculators/graphing-ca...

The Ti-84 Plus CE also has Python.

When I search Python on the page I find no results?

Look under "Program Functions"

Seems odd to include Python but not a CAS.

Artificial market segmentation, such as TI-83/84 relative to TI-89.

Some tests that you can use this calculator on don’t allow you to use a calculator with a built in CAS. Python is fine because you would still need to copy your own CAS onto the calculator for it to have that feature

That's what pen and paper are for. Calculator is for getting answers to shit.

Also TI-84 Plus CE

https://education.ti.com/en/products/calculators/graphing-ca...

A raspberry-pi might do better than this calculator. Besides comparing different things, a calculator's main design goal should be to assist with calculations and last for a long time. Anything beyond that it is overkill. If your goal is to visualize-and-study, use a PC.

Can we all just take a moment to appreciate that their cookie dialog has a button that says "Do not sell or share my personal information"? I think that's the most clear-cut cookie dialog I've ever seen.

We have one of those in the house. Seems competent and capable enough, although I am a bit sad that we still can't have Mathematica in a calculator by now.

I think you could!

Raspian used to come with Mathematica. There are plenty of pocket raspi machines you could run it on and boot directly to a window.

https://www.open-electronics.org/pocketpi-raspberry-pi-pocke...

My Pi4 has it.

I'd rather have a lisp than a python on a calculator.

You'd be surprised we had those 30 years ago [1] :)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-yuZ2pejGU

hehe, fully defmacro capable even

also, hp RPL was stack+lisp in disguise

Why not today?

Knew somebody was gonna say this!

Too bad it's too weak to get pytorch working with a LLM to be able to teach you math or help catch mistakes.

I loved it until I saw the part about asubscription.

That page is awful at explaining the subscription and I'm not surprised you were confused by it. The subscription is actually for teachers using the projection/emulator software, not for normal users of the calculator.

Let me try in hope calculator enthusiasts are in the room: I have a need for a specific calculator for young teenager with ADHD.

It has to show input and output at the same time (or at least full input), be ergonomic (backlight, nice keys) and not looking childish.

Right now I’m borrowing my SwissMicro RPN which is awesome gadget but outside of complete overkill - its not backlighted display is hard to read.

Context is that the kid has very short working memory. Whereas they understand the concepts really well (I help with tutoring) due to frequent mistakes and forgetting numbers mid-flight the grades are awful which negatively impacts attitude etc.

I noticed positive impact with calculator because not only they start to memorize some basic calculations, they also start to feel general result correctness based on those visual inputs.

As mentioned before - SwissMicro works but maybe there’s something with backlight and not RPN based. It has to be calculator not an app because I hope to convince school to let them used daily.

As someone who also likes RPN, I think for Texas Instruments TI-30XS MultiView is a good calculator. You can see the input at once, but I don't know any calculator with backlight, exept when you want something like HP Prime.

I submitted an Ask HN a few months back about handheld calculators: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36975021

There are some great comments and discussions there.

I ended up buying the Casio fx-991 ES PLUS as a result.

If ES plus is the type of calculator you want, fx-991EX classwiz is a more capable version in every way except maybe the price. If you don't want a graphing calculator, programming and CAS on it, the fx-991EX is one of the best, if not the best scientific calculator out there (haven't seen many, though).

Includes beautiful UI (roots, exponents and fractions are displayed like we write them, so more is visible, and the navigation is easier), spreadsheets, printing out values of a real function, solving any real equation for X (one solution at a time, gotta give it different starting Xs for optimization, though), some very basic probability (Gauss) statistics (e.g. linear regression), up to 4x4 matrices, finding derivative in a point, sum over a range, integral over an interval, arithmetic with complex numbers etc.

It doesn't render graphs, but, it renders a qr code that a phone can scan and then the phone shows the graph, so some graphing is there for studying, but not an exam.

Thank you. I mostly use it for very basic calculations. I had started to re-teach myself linear algebra with the hopes of heading into trig and calculus. But ended up losing interest/energy.

Practically speaking, I probably would have been better off getting a much simpler calculator with bigger number buttons. But I do love the aesthetic of the scientific calculator, it seems to hold so much potential.

If you look under Casio's website under the category of "Standard Scientific Calculators" (https://www.casio.com/intl/scientific-calculators/standard-m...) they have some calculators where you can see the input and output at the same time and navigate the input with arrows. I had one that was like the "fx-350ES plus" (https://www.casio.com/intl/scientific-calculators/product.FX...) in high school but they have a selection of newer looking models that support the same kind of many-featured (fractions, exponents, integrals, ...) pixel graphic inputs rather than the simple 2 line LCD.

You might be interested in the one made by NumWorks (https://www.numworks.com/)

This fits your checklist I think: - notably more intuitive than the classical Texas Instrument / Casio - calculations input are shown - ( not that it seems to matter for you, but it also has python on it )

Thanks for the recommendation. I played couple minutes with the simulator and decided to order it. Seems exactly like something I was looking for.

The calculator in the article, the fx-cg50 is just what he needs.

It's like the FX-991ex mentioned elsewhere but it remembers more things and has history and a display that is decent.

I own one and have been using it for a couple of years now.

If you can let go of the backlight requirement, then the TI-89 is great value used. They go 15-30€ range. They were TI's flagship calculator at some point. Well-known, and extensively reviewed.

Many consider its TI nSPIRE successors to be flawed.

Avoid TI-83/84, despite fancy-looking backlit screen and smartphone-inspired UX, they are ultimately the successors of TI-82, the "high schooler" stripped down functionality version of the TI-85.

I was interested. But I got slammed with a bunch of pop ups that took over the screen.

Sites dead to me and I won’t by their product. I don’t care how cool it is.

Install an ad-blocker with annoyance block lists and stuff. I agree with you on the same things, but this site had Zero popups for me.

Edit. Not even a newsletter, or cookie consent banner. Awesome.

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