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Ask Slashdot: What To Do With Found Calculators?
New submitter Covalent writes "I'm a science teacher and have, over the years, accumulated a number of lost graphing calculators (mostly TI-83s). After trying to locate the owners, I have given up and have been loaning them out to students as needed. I want to something more nerd-worthy with them, though. I would feel wrong for selling them. What is the best use for bunch of old calculators?"
Yup.. It's about the same as if I had asked "I get old computer stuff abandon with me. What should I do with it?" . I give it to people who want or need it.
In other industries, there is a standard 90 day storage.. After that, they can do with it as if it is their own. If it's legally titled stuff (like a car), you have to request a court ordered transfer of ownership. Something like a calculator? If the owner didn't come get it, it's yours.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
CALCnet allows networking of TI-83 and similar calculators with relatively simple external hardware.
With that detail out of the way, you are free to implement a display-wall and/or the most powerful z80 cluster computer in the known universe.
Extra credit, of course, will be awarded if you succeed in writing an xorg driver that can treat an MxN array of networked calculators as a greyscale display of appropriate resolution.
As the author of that hack, I solidly second that suggestion. We also have a bunch of other calculator hacking projects that might interest you, like case-modding, adding features likes backlights, PS/2 ports, a touchpad, etc. There was the FloppyTunes project ( http://www.cemetech.net/projects/item.php?id=38 ) that lets you play music on a floppy drive with a calculator. Since you have so many calculators, though, CALCnet would be fun to play with, and since we're always looking for people to help with a wireless version of CALCnet, that might be something fun. And no one has written a distributed computation system with CALCnet yet!
$150? That'd be a 3DS. A new DS is $100 from Best Buy. $70 if you get a refurbished one. Go down to GameStop, and you can get a used one for even less. Hit a pawn shop or ebay, and you can go even lower. I'd be willing to bet that Goodwill and similar places have some for sale fairly cheaply as well.
And don't forget, even the poor have relatives. Mom & Dad may be too proud to take money from their parents or siblings, but you can bet the kids won't mind getting a shiny new electronic toy for a birthday or Christmas from their aunt, uncle, or grandparent. And going back to the used bit above, a lot of younger kids get consoles and such as hand-me-downs from an older brother or sister in high school or college... who may have bought it with their own money, from their own job.
My family wasn't poverty-level poor when I was a kid, but we were poor... and quite a few of the nicer toys that I got came from my oldest brother, who went into the Navy right out of high school, and was flush with cash for a few years, until he decided to move off-base.