Slashdot Mirror
Flash Drives On a Calculator
aawm writes with the following news for graphing calculator fans. "As the result of a group effort between Michael Vincent, Brandon Wilson, and Dan Englender, msd8x v0.94 has been released, which allows you to use ordinary USB flash drives with a TI-84 Plus. With the appropriate cable, you can browse, modify, and copy (in both directions) files between a flash drive and the 84 Plus's RAM and/or archive."
So I can use it to help me on my Algebra test tomorrow! Damn those equations!
-jX
Don't you just love politics? It's like a comedy of errors.
Strap a dodgy home made looking cable out of the back of an innocuous calculator going into what could be described as a small cell phone receiver (remember, as a TSA guard you don't have too much time...).
Good luck on the plane to see your parents.
liqbase
I haven't really used my graphing calculator since I graduated from college. I miss using that ti-89. Ahhh the nerdity...
Now I can....
wait... what can I do with this?
So all someone has to do now is just squeze the flash drive into the calculator case and make the connections directly to the wires inside and they'll be able to bring a scan of the entire text book with them for the test. Great I guess that's the end of using graphing calcs on tests.
And the project has been around for even longer that that. It's still a great achievement.
Ah, yes, I remember MV saying they had the ability to interface with a flash drive done half a year ago, and they were just working on getting its interface to a usable state. But as for the finished program, it only came out five days ago, which isn't that long.
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Cell phones that play MP3s?
Well, this sounds like fun. Mostly just "because you can", but on the other hand, I know the TI-89 eBook reader was pretty nice. Maybe this would be useful for something like that. Maybe some new project will come along now that an external flash drive is available. Everyone makes fun of these types of projects, but I think the entire thing's just good fun. I used to use calculator games or books to occupy my time between classes in college when I didn't feel like (or need to) study or work on homework. Today when I have a little downtime I just use a Nintendo DS, but the principle's the same.
And anyway, it's good electronics and hardware interface and programming practice for the developers. Congratulations to Michael, Brandon, and Dan!
Nathan
nhaines@ticalc.org
what no ti-89T support? lame
how long do the bateries last when powering a flash drive?
...my HP calculator has had an SD card slot and USB port for 4 years. This is news? On Slashdot?
This isn't Digg or anything...
Performing sanity checks on your own beliefs is vital in avoiding poisoned koolaid.
I still use my trusty HP 48. Many other people I know in my Physics department also love theirs and wouldn't dream of using another calculator. Back at Sixth form all I'd ever hear was "TI this", "TI that"; they were educational units. My HP is a professional's tool — they were always leagues ahead in terms of robustness and features. All that live object orientation was astounding given the hardware limitations. HP got there first.
I recently graduated with a BS in Mathematics. High school was not very long ago, and there we were required to use graphing calculators for Junior and Senior level math classes. To this day, I don't understand the purpose of having students buy graphing calculators.
Graphing calculators have the problem of really dumbing things down. Learning how to use the calculator is a bit of a hurdle... but once you do, you can get by without learning the quadratic equation, how to convert from moles to grams, what the relation between physical and kinetic energy is, &ct. It's expected that most of this will come with the calculator, but that which doesn't is a simple exercise in typing to fix.
Also, there is a problem of monetary cost. $100 may not be a lot to most people, but it is for a few. It's money that could be much better spent too. Think about it... $100 per high school student, in a system where you have roughly one math teacher for every two hundred students?
So what do we get in exchange for this? There's two productive uses of a graphing calculator.
The first, institutional use, is that kids will understand Analytical Geometry and Trig better if they can SEE equations. It's easy to imagine how this might help a kid understand how to push around equations like F(x-x0) + y0. It's just not a very useful thing to learn. I know calculators are capable of so much more, graphing Crossed Troughs and whatnought, but that's too far beyong what you learn in high school to be meaningful.
The other benefit merits a bit of appreciation... the student recreational use. If you give a kid a ball and free time, he'll kick it. If you give a kid a programmable machine and free time, he'll program it. Even so, very few students actually do this. It's encouraging to see kids compare their text adventures with each other, but but 95% of the student body, this toy is pearls before swine.
Graphing calculators, not wholly without benefits, do not outweigh the problems they cause. Ironically, the place they deal the most damage is probably math, because we end up with kids getting by without understanding order of operations or basic algebraic manipulation. Give schools robotics teams, not calculators.
RPN is hard.
I still use my 48sx from the early 90s. And I have a 15C somewhere that still kicks butt.
HPs are tools, the TIs feel like toys.
These days, for simple stuff I use google as a calculator (and unit converter). http://www.googleguide.com/calculator.html
Around where I live and go to school (some town in New York), HP-produced calculators are not prevalent in the slightest. I haven't physically seen one, ever. Everyone that uses graphing calculators either has some version of a TI-83 or TI-84, and rarely TI-89's.
Most of the teachers in our school, anyway, are familiar with the concept of resetting all memory before a quiz that involves a calculator. "Helpful," ie illegal, files are quite useless is this case. When such an quiz occurs, people who use their calculator almost entirely for gaming (during class) are usually not happy with the prospect of eliminating a source of diversion. Heaven forbid they multiply 6.62E-34 with 2E20, or divide 733 by 6, by hand.
HP 50g with built-in SD card slot.
26 years, and going strong. I think it's on its fourth set of batteries...
Now I can cheat on my math exam, by uploading OCR'ed versions of my math text book into my calculator's flash drive. Geez, some people have no imagination. :P
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
Flash drives on a calculator, you say?
But what about snakes on a... nah, it would never work.
It was posted on hackaday 3 days ago.
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
Some details for those that are curious:
The TI-84 Plus calculator has a USB on-the-go port, meaning it can act as either device or host. Unfortunately the calculator's operating system has no provisions to allow it to connect, as host, to anything other than another calculator or a Vernier data collection thingie. The calculator has a mini-USB port, so a mini-A to A-female adapter cable is required to connect most devices.
I wrote a piece of software, usb8x, which configures and controls the calculator's USB port for use with other devices. It contains the low level USB host (think root hub) driver, and higher level drivers for: mice, keyboards, gamepads, EasyTemp (one of the vernier thingies mentioned above), Silverlink (a TI connection cable), and mass storage devices. The mass storage driver (and msd8x) was started by Michael and finished by Brandon.
The software this article mentions, msd8x, is a UI to access the mass storage driver. It contains a file browser so you can import/export files, and run programs from the drive. The raw read speed via usb8x from a flash drive seems to max out at about 130 KB/s. Reading data from the file system is a bit slower, maxing at about 80 KB/s. Writing data to a file is significantly slower, anywhere from 5 to 40 KB/s, depending on if the file needs to be grown (and on the sectors per cluster and the speed of the flash drive). I'd say the speeds aren't bad considering this is running on a 15 mhz Z80 processor.
Anyhow, I can't speak for Michael or Brandon, but I worked on the USB stuff because I found it to be fun. There are practical applications for those of us that use graphing calculators, but regardless, I don't think that's a requirement for a cool hack. Anyhow, I hope you enjoy it if you have a TI-84 Plus, and that we've provided some good fodder for the usual witty repartee otherwise.
-Dan Englender
Responding to many posts above, TIs have had flash memory for years, just like the HPs. Like stated above, they do not have SD readers. What's great about this new creation is that it allows the calculator to communicate with an external flash drive, allowing for additional portable storage. Furthermore, the connection of a flash stick is made easy by the fact that TIs have integrated USB ports since about two years ago (Do the HPs have integrated USB ports? Maybe they do too, I'm not sure).
http://www.johnmunsch.com/2001/08/calculator_rip_o ffs.html
http://www.epinions.com/content_62095134340
Some reporter out there please do a piece on the monopoly and marketing push by these calculator companies forcing students to buy expensive calculators. These things NEVER come down in price. Those arm processors are expensive?
While I am not an educator by training, Ithink I can offer a little insight into why calculators (and other computer systems) are seen as Good Things, in the teaching of mathematics and physics.
The reason to use them in a classroom is because they're prevalent in real life. It doesn't make sense for students to slave over problems that nobody does anymore, once they've learned the critical concepts involved. Instead, that time would be better spent in class, learning more advanced material. Furthermore, it would be doing students a bit of a disservice to not expose them to the tools that are standard practice in the real world, and in higher-level academia. (We can argue about whether teachers effectively use the time that's saved by powerful tools to teach more advanced material, but that's more of a commentary on our educational system generally, and not on the tools involved.)
This argument is not a new one; half a century ago, we might have had the same discussion over the appropriateness of Comptometers in a statistics class, versus using pen-and-pencil or a simpler adding machine. Using the tool instead of doing something manually necessarily implies that you will become less practiced at the manual skill: the ultimate question being, which is more valuable? The experience using the tool, or the ability of doing it manually?
There are a lot of things, where I am not sure that the ability to do them manually is valuable anymore. For example, I think we're rapidly approaching the point where long division is obsolete. There's really no point in making students practice it until they're blue in the face, except as it makes learning some related and more-important skills easier. Once you understand what division is, and how it works, bring on the machines, and start teaching more complex material.
There are some places where students shouldn't stop practicing basic skills, and those are the areas where those basic skills are direct requirements for more advanced ones. For example, I think it's a mistake to let students use a CAS in their Algebra 1 class, because it might cause them to not understand the basics of symbolic manipulation, which is the key to much higher mathematics. However, more mechanical skills can be conveniently forgotten with little consequence, provided the tools are always available.
So in general, I think that once a tool has saturated our society -- and I think at this point, that computers and graphing calculators have -- it becomes appropriate to bring them into the classroom. Except where skills have to be done unaided for pedagogical reasons, I think our default approach to teaching should use all the tools that are commonly available. That way, students have a chance to cover more material in school, and are better prepared when they move on to higher education or the workforce, because they're familar with the tools.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I love TI calcualtors and everything, don't get me wrong, the TI-89 is great.... the thing is, TI has improved there product SQUAT since I bought mine in freakin' 1999! The current generation of TI-89 is almost EXACTLY the same, despite the fact that it must now cost them a fraction of the cost to manufacture as it did in 1999. Lets face it, we are talking about an archaic CPU, a ultra low resolution black OR white display, limited memory, limited functionality. Now, I'm not saying that the next gen calculator should have more hardware for the sake of keeping up to date, but it should really at least have a large subset of the capabilities of PC software packages such as MATLAB, Mathcad, Mathematica, etc.... why are they holding back? They could improve the product so much, but they refuse to do so, and instead charge you $120 for something that costs them $5 to manufacture.
Go figure...
My HP49GII has an SD card slot in it and reads and writes just fine to my 1gb sd card. If you really need that kind of storage in a calculator maybe you don't actually need a calculator so much as a palmtop?
I just checked e-bay and HP 48gx calculators are selling for $200 to $400! :-)
I love mine. At 13 years old, it's still the absolute best tool for so many jobs.
They'll have to pry "Hewey" from my cold dead hands...
The problem (especially with Texas Instruments calculators) is that they've actually wormed their way into the educational system. I know in school, that, rather than teach us how to draw graphs by hand the teachers went over the Ti-83 and Ti-89 commands for drawing graphs. Anyone without a graphing calculator (or even an non-Texas Instruments calculator) was out of luck, as there was no explanation of how to do things by hand, or any aid with any "non-standard" calculators. Texas Instruments gives away calculators to middle (grades 6 - 8) and high (grades 9 - 12) schools in order to preserve an unofficial monopoly. Students are allowed to use other graphing calculators, but the school warns them that the teachers will offer no help with technical issues.
I encountered the same issue in my first college calculus course. The problems were all designed with large numbers, and were intended to require a calculator to solve. Fortunately, the university has two parallel math tracks, one allowing calculators and one prohibiting, so I was able to switch to a course where students competed on their own merits.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
I wish the TI had an RPN mode. I miss the stack, it was so much fun.
HP, on the other hand, even before the board went crazy trying to find out who called who when, seems to have forgotten that it even has a calculator division.
Don't get me wrong: My first "real" calculator was an HP 11C, and I have an HP 28S that I still prefer for personal use. When I teach high-school chemistry and physics, however, I use my TI-84.
Their newer calculators (HP-49g+ and HP50g) have an SD slot.
They also have StrongARM CPUs which tend to do things pretty fast, as compared with most TI operations. Recommend that you look into these pretty incredible machines if you're shopping for a calculator.
Well, when I said "MP3 player", I mean it in its colloquial usage: a portable music player (at least that's what we call them here in China). I didn't mean to imply that it would be able to play MP3s without first converting them into a usable format.
Want a high quality FOSS RTS game? Try Warzone 2100!
Believe it or not...all in the works.
RPN is NOT hard. It is only hard if you don't understand what a mathematical statement really means - which is what scared people off from it. The fact that 6+4*27/(sqrt(90-9)) needed to be translated into the actual sequence of operations it represents, namely 90 - 9 = result, take square root result, keep as result a, do 4 * 27, call that result b, do a/b, and then add 6.... or, in RPN: 6 [enter] 4 [enter] 27 * 90 [enter] 9 - SQRT / + and you are done. RPN teaches you how to visualize what is going on in many different ways - it was not only superfast, it was also a great teaching tool....
Sorry about the rant. It was from when HP was a great company, not the bloated husk of crap it is today. I miss the old HP.
Shocked, I say, that you haven't had to graph quadratic equations or find derivatives outside of a classroom environment.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
Somebody doesn't get FatWallet.
a tid=18&threadid=643359
I bought a TI-83 Plus for 74.54 - $25 rebate = $49.54 on Aug. 17, 2006.
http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/messageview.php?c
I don't even have a ti calculator and I love seeing things like this. News items like this are the reason I read /. every day!
I'm surprised so many people are complaining about this posting. If you think it's dumb, don't post under it.
I'll bet there are many postings that I'm not interested in that you enjoy. I don't go into them and say why I think they are stupid.