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HP Releases Hackable ARM-Based Calculator

Posted by Soulskill on from the turning-tools-to-toys dept.

mikeselectricstuff writes "HP's 20b business consultant calculator isn't the sort of thing that would normally interest the average Slashdotter, but HP has released a Devkit for it, including schematics and source for a sample application, and they appear to be actively encouraging people to re-purpose it. Maybe the engineers thought a business calculator was just too boring for their hardware? The calculator is based on an Atmel ARM chip, and it has a bootloader and JTAG interface to allow user applications to be written and downloaded, turning a boring calculator into anything you can do within the constraints of the hardware."

5 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. More Companies Should Do This by Marillion · · Score: 4, Informative

    Of course most customers will use this as is. I'm thankful that HP isn't so paranoid of what their niche customers might do. The right of people to tweak products to suit their needs is a right that needs to be preserved.

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    1. Re:More Companies Should Do This by ettlz · · Score: 3, Informative

      When it comes to calculators, I don't think HP have ever been at all bad in that respect. It's not for nothing that their calculators are something akin to the "workstations" of their class: there's always been loads of documentation out there for the HP 28, 48, etc. plus a metric ton of third-party software. A HP graphic calculator can expect to be "re-purposed" any number of times in its useful life (which is a very long time) as part of normal use.

    2. Re:More Companies Should Do This by Tacvek · · Score: 4, Informative

      I mean consider that the HP49g+ has 3 compilers and deompilers built-in, as well as a debugger for UserRPL and SystemRPL. I also believe it may be the only calculator with an SD card slot. (The hp50g is just a slight hardware revision to the HP49g+, although the keyboard is significantly improved, and the use of 4 AAA is also a notable improvement.)

      Consider that it is the hardware platform for the DC-50 [http://www.pssllc.com/] surveying data collector, and it is clear the calc can be re-purposed.

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  2. Re:Oh dear. by Goaway · · Score: 4, Informative

    You should not be so quick to call for others to return their geek card, when you yourself is not even aware of one of the biggest legends in computing.

  3. Re:Why? by lm317t · · Score: 3, Informative

    Aside from power, weight and poor tolerance to extreme temperature changes, try controlling a servo or stepper with a laptop in a critical realtime environment, like with sensors. You might be able to do this with a parallel port, but it would be extremely unreliable without a true realtime OS and alot of hacking, also expensive. Unless you admire Rube Goldberg this would be foolish. You can actually guarantee better response time with a fairly slow embedded processor.

    There's much more to the computing world than X86 processors. In fact laptops, desktop, and servers are in the minority as far as computing chips are concerned.

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