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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."
But I get better results! Before, 1+1 was always 2, but now it's 2.0358!
Beowulf clusters of overclocked T.I. calculators!!!
Too Much Time On Their Hands Department.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Pfft, tell me when you've over clocked a pencil and paper.
I tried to overclock my slide rule, but it just went up in smoke.
The coolest voice ever.
This is soooo old. I overclocked my TI calc several years ago, putting a snazzy OC switch on the side. All of my friends were terribly impressed.
On the other hand, it didn't really help in my classes, except to get the wrong answer faster...
Utilities have been coded to overclock HP48/HP49 calculators to a wide range of clock speeds - you can pick and choose what you like, up to 200MHz. This is pretty impressive too - that's more than a doubling of clock speed, IIRC.
the Futurama cryogenic lab tech.... "Welcooome....To the WOOOOORLD of 5 YEARS AGO!"
This has been known for years. Keep in mind that overclocking by 2x drains the batteries by 2x as well.
I overclocked my casio wrist watch. Now I have all the time I need.
I don't know what's wrong with the slashdot submission process, but this isn't a new site.
That site has been around for nine years, and in fact it doesn't list any of the popular TI graphing calculators today. The TI-83 Plus, 84 Plus, 92 Plus, and Voyage 200 are all missing. (Incidentally, this French guide will show you how to overclock your 83 Plus).
Sure it's a great site for overclocking older calculators, but please don't say "something new" when this has been widely known for years.
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...
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Wow, the TI-89 uses an RC oscillator for its clock! That kind of clock is one of the cheapest and least accurate, so I wouldn't want to run a real-time-clock off of it. I wonder if they have some sort of calibration mechanism on the production line, or if the processors are so underclocked already that they will surely work with a large variation of clock speeds. Even after leaving the production line, RC clocks drift and are more sensitive to temperature, so TI must always leave plenty of speed margin.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
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.
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What happened to graphing calculator development? While I was in High School there was this burst of activity with the TI line, with frequent new models and upgrades. And then they stalled. And stymed. I got a TI-92 Plus my senior year in High School, and that has stayed TI's top-of-the-line ever since. It's like they've done zero development for the past ten years. You can get full color-screen Game Boy Advances with hardware far in advance of what you would find in a TI for about 100 dollars less, yet you have to use hardware trickery to fake greyscale on these dinosaurs. Their Ancient. Years after I've graduated college, they're still the best you can get. Now they're called the Voyage 200, but they're still the same 68000 - based calc with very similar limitations.
Where is somebody to steal TI's crown? Somebody has to recognize the power of full-color 3D graphics in mathematics. Doesn't anyone want the market TI has abandoned?
The ______ Agenda
Already done - your job's been outsourced to India, where they do your paper-and-pencil work faster for a quarter of the price.
Oh, we're cutting costs, so make sure to return your pink slip with your badge so we can use them both again.
I overclocked Earth the day before the dinosaurs died.
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Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
"ammm.... is this really a news item or just some sad person with way to much time." ... said the guy posting on Slashdot.
"Derp de derp."
or play .ogg files?
This was going on when I was in high school, 10 years ago. (not that I'm incredibly old, but being ten years behind the curve is spectacular even for slashdot) You could overclock a TI-85 pretty easily, although it wasn't really necessary. The real joy was in installing a hacked ROM through an overflow on the link cable and running games written in Z80 assembly. It was the ultimate time-waster: a gameboy that your teachers allowed in class. TI even caught on later that their overflow bug had become a feature, and built in access to run assembly code on the TI-86.
There were some truly great games written, too. A few (Sqrxz comes to mind) even eventually made the leap to the gameboy.