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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."
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
Now I can....
wait... what can I do with this?
In the UK any calculator capable of displaying stored text is automatically disallowed for GCSE and A-Level exams. Any calculator capable of storing programs on it has for wiped in front of a invigilator for the exam and anything that can do symbolic algebra is banned. Of course this requires that the people administering the exams know what they are doing. Unfortunately mine did so I wasn't allowed my Ti-89 anywhere near the exam hall - you could have fitted a fair amount of info in plain text on it 2.3Mb internal memory and it even has a basic e-book reader for it.
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
Not even 99/4A support! Bah!
...which cued about a 1001 different "memory clear" hacks, ranging from ones that looked like the real thing and mimicked the behaviour, to ones that actively hacked the OS to simulate a memory clear while just hiding the files.
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.
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
I don't know if any consumer flash drives have enough space for all of the equations they want you to memorize..
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?