Slashdot Mirror
TI Calculators Play Movies
ipapusha writes "TI Calculator enthusiasts rejoice. A few weeks ago, Dan Englender released a new flash application usb8x. Usb8x is a driver that interfaces with the On-the-Go USB port in the TI-84 Plus and TI-84 Plus Silver Edition. It is designed to be used by other programmers to create drivers for a variety of USB peripherals, including a keyboard and mouse. Already, ticalc.org's own Michael Vincent has interfaced his Lexar JumpDrive to play The Matrix's famous lobby scene. (mirror) ."
Here's another mirror if necessary:
http://xaxxon.slackworks.com/2005-08-16-usb.wmv
Yeah, but does it run linux?
*Dodges Tomato*
The preceding message was based on actual events. Only the names, locations and events have been changed.
I must be old. I remember the time where calculators were used to do calculations and even plotting a nice graphic of a function.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
Student was expelled from school when he accidentally played loud porn in a classroom during an exam.
It looks more like the Matrix than the Matrix...
that this was one on a TI. It would have been much cooler on a HP. Still a nice hack though.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you TI fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of my calculator (a TI-89) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to invert a 7 by 7 matrix. 20 minutes. At home, on my HP48 running at 4 Mhz, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this TI, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this matrix inversion, The calculator will not work. It has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various TI calculators, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a TI that has run faster than its HP counterpart, despite the TI's faster chip architecture. My Casio FX-100 runs faster than this 12 Mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the TI is a superior machine.
TI addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use TI calculators over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
*Throws out DVD Player and Laptop*
I don't need these anymore! I've got my TI-84!
CmdrTaco: You know, we haven't had the chance to use that great 'Blue and Red Pill' icon for the Matrix section in a while. I really miss that. They were good movies, and while some might argue that they don't deserve their own section and icon, I believe they are truly a geek phenomenon.
ScuttleMonkey: Hey, why don't we post this story about using calculators to play movies. Some guy played The Matrix on his TI, it's just the excuse we need. Now everyone who visits the homepage will see the icon and think 'Wow, something about The Matrix! I am interested in that story.'
CmdrTaco: You know, that's just crazy enough to work. Well done ScuttleMonkey, when you get home tonight there'll be another storey on your parents' house. You can finally move out of the basement. Now, all we need is some news on The Hobbit movie and the One True Ring will shine on the homepage for all to see!
Disclaimer: Post written under influence of a few Pub Quiz beers.
- HM
For those of you tuning in on your TI calculators:
/\
N=NEO
G=GUY
T=TRIN
Act One:
N G
|-R ~~~~~~*X <- Bullet time
/\ /\
Act Two:
|---Nice shot.
|
T
B <----- N
/\ |
|---"Whoa. Nice Latex"
Act Three:
>-Z
|---- "Whoa. Nice punch"
Could've done it in 3 lines of RPN, incidentally.
Please help metamoderate.
Hi all, thanks for the comments. I'll make a few myself:
:)
* First: Thanks Google. usb8x is a Summer of Code project. Google's support meant I didn't have to find a real job.
* A greyscale movie would definitely have been better than a B&W one. But the point of Michael's demo was proof of concept for a mass-storage device driver. That's pretty darn impressive as it is, in Z80 assembly with no OS support. I'm sure someone will come along and write a pretty version soon.
* Some more details about the hardware platform: The TI84 Plus has a 15 MHZ Z80 CPU and a 96X64 monochrome display. You can fake greyscale pretty well by swaping planes. It has a 2-bit serial port, and a full-speed On-The-Go USB port. Unfortunately the OS doesn't provide any support for USB device drivers.
* OK, so I'll admit: this was mainly done for the "it's cool" factor. But there are useful applications. As silly as it may sound to you, students these days do plug in keyboards to their calculators to take notes on. Or at least TI would certainly like them to, and now they don't have to buy the ridiculously expensive TI branded keyboard to do so. And TI calculators are actually quite useful if you're in the field collecting data with a Vernier probe. Now you can carry along a USB thumb drive and not worry about running out of space for your data.
* Besides, it's cool
-Dan Englender