Overclocking Calculators?

Klar writes "If you're looking for something new to prove your tech prowess, Richard Piotter has a great how to on overclocking Texas Instruments graphing calculators. You can actually double the cpu speed, which is noticeable when graphing complex functions."

Comments

From the

[ScrewMaster]

Too Much Time On Their Hands Department.

Re:The Point?

[Spy Hunter]

Graphing complex functions is slow. Calculating integrals is slow. 3D graphs are abysmally slow. Speeding these functions up could be quite useful. Of course, you could just use Virtual TI on your PC if you wanted it to be really fast, or there's always Mathematica. I'm sure overclocking your calculator cuts the battery life in half or worse, which is why they are clocked so low by TI to begin with. Now if he could figure out a way for it to automatically overclock itself only while doing calculations (not waiting for input), then he might be onto something...

Actually quite useful.

[SharpFang]

Laugh all you want, these calculators are capable of stuff that's really time consuming.
Put

Y1=(somefunction)
Y2=FnInt(Y1(X),X,0,X)

Y2 displays integral of Y1. This isn't docummented anywhere and not without a reason. Getting the plot of even a simple function like Y1=sin(X) takes some 5 minutes as the integral is calculated separately for each pixel. Put more sophisticated function for Y1, or put Y3=FnInt(Y2... to get second integral and wait 2 hours or so for results easily.

In this case overclocking serves saving the batteries. True at double speed the batteries are used up nearly twice as much, but running for a hour at a single speed will drain them more than running for half a hour at double speed.

And yeah, these "insane" times are quite reasonable. I've been writing some cool stuff for my TI82. Generating a fractal took maybe a hour or so. "brute forcing" some logical problem lasted only 15 minutes just thanks to some luck (the solution was within first 5% tested). I found the graphs of integrals useful - I entered the function on the start of a test and could test whether my calculations were correct when it was drawn about the middle (and I had to use the calculator for other calculations). It was actually pretty fast at "your generic" numerical methods, and as we were free to choose the platform/language for writing our "numerical methods" programs, I didn't have to show up in the lab even once whole semester, wrote everything on the calculator.
One thing that sucks is lack of recursion support, Even the Prog[NAME]/Return function works only 1 level deep. But even this can be solved by using lists instead of local variables, matrices instead of lists.