I've spoken to countless now-engineers and professional programmers who started learned programming by playing around with graphing calculators. They're ubiquitous, your audience is huge, and the built-in TI-BASIC language is surprisingly powerful. I'd definitely recommend he pursue that as a means to learn to think like a programmer, skills like structuring programs, prototyping with pseudocode, debugging, and all that. In fact, I wrote a book teaching those very skills. Alternatively, Python is a great beginner computer language in that the syntax is clear and cruft-free (yes, Java, I'm looking at public static void main()...) and crashes are generally graceful and easy-to-debug.
I'm amused how many people overlooked the fact that although all the links on the page go to jpl.nasa.gov, the site itself is fake. Didn't the Mardi Gras beads give it away?
That we don't know yet, but we strongly suspect they will. Unless things go terribly wrong, though, they won't be locking it down the way they locked down the Nspire.
Since i posted this article, we discovered many things:
- The TI-84+CSE will have a z80 processor, same as the TI-82, TI-83, and TI-83+/84+
- It will have an Nspire-esque rechargeable battery
- It will have a TI-84+/SE-compatible OS, so the same math books and lessons will work with it.
Absolutely agreed. I just wrote a book on learning to program using graphing calculators as a springboard, entitled "Programming the TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus", which ironically ships from the bindery to stores today! I heartily recommend getting kids excited about programming with graphing calculators, and in thirteen years of volunteering my time to the community I've seen hundreds of users become calculator programmers and later engineers or software developers. Sidebar: the LCD is 96x64, or 96x120 on the TI-86.
Actually, the TI-84+/SE have a USB slave port, which with some software bitbanging enterprising community hackers have turned into a host port for HID peripherals. So the USB keyboard/mouse with a calculator is a reality. Even the "dinky" TI-83 can be made to speak PS/2 with one or two KB of assembly code.
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!
Capitalization failures aside, Qazz is correct. I'm working on a direct USB counterpart for the TI-84+ and the TI-84+SE, both of which have a miniUSB port, to enable globalCALCnet with no extra hardware.
Asking "why" is the wrong question. We do this kind of stuff because we can. I enjoy the challenge of pushing calculator hardware as far as it can go, then a bit further, because it's hard, and therefore rewarding.
Siwelwerd, notice that at this point the hardware I've designed requires a wired connection to a computer with an internet. If I were to make it wireless, or remove the need for a computer, then you might have more of a headache, but I don't think you'll have that much of a problem at this point.
Thanks! Yesterday I played the latest beta of Obliterate on my calculator with a user in Massachusetts and another in California. If you're going to ask "why", you don't understand the motivations behind calculator coders such as myself.
As far the enthusiast community has been able to figure out, since they make a massive profit on the hardware, what they're mostly selling is a piece of software, namely the calculator's OS. It costs them nothing to replicate that OS ad infinitum, and the only recent updates they've made to it have been poorly-tested and quite buggy, so they have little incentive to improve their calculator line other than pressure from other calculator manufacturers like HP and Casio.
Exactly. I do plenty of coding for high-performance systems for not-fun; it's a fun challenge to kick back and try to challenge myself with a low-resource device. Also, as far as the TI-Nspire goes, it's an extremely locked-down platform, and one on which TI actively discourages third-party development.
Slashdot Mirror
I've spoken to countless now-engineers and professional programmers who started learned programming by playing around with graphing calculators. They're ubiquitous, your audience is huge, and the built-in TI-BASIC language is surprisingly powerful. I'd definitely recommend he pursue that as a means to learn to think like a programmer, skills like structuring programs, prototyping with pseudocode, debugging, and all that. In fact, I wrote a book teaching those very skills. Alternatively, Python is a great beginner computer language in that the syntax is clear and cruft-free (yes, Java, I'm looking at public static void main()...) and crashes are generally graceful and easy-to-debug.
I'm amused how many people overlooked the fact that although all the links on the page go to jpl.nasa.gov, the site itself is fake. Didn't the Mardi Gras beads give it away?
That we don't know yet, but we strongly suspect they will. Unless things go terribly wrong, though, they won't be locking it down the way they locked down the Nspire.
Since i posted this article, we discovered many things: - The TI-84+CSE will have a z80 processor, same as the TI-82, TI-83, and TI-83+/84+ - It will have an Nspire-esque rechargeable battery - It will have a TI-84+/SE-compatible OS, so the same math books and lessons will work with it.
That's only for TI's terrible new TI-Nspire calculators. The TI-83+ and TI-84+ series have the free TI-Connect software available.
On a z80 processor, yes; on a TI-83/+/84+/SE, sadly no. Nowhere near enough RAM and ROM, sadly.
Absolutely agreed. I just wrote a book on learning to program using graphing calculators as a springboard, entitled "Programming the TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus", which ironically ships from the bindery to stores today! I heartily recommend getting kids excited about programming with graphing calculators, and in thirteen years of volunteering my time to the community I've seen hundreds of users become calculator programmers and later engineers or software developers. Sidebar: the LCD is 96x64, or 96x120 on the TI-86.
Actually, the TI-84+/SE have a USB slave port, which with some software bitbanging enterprising community hackers have turned into a host port for HID peripherals. So the USB keyboard/mouse with a calculator is a reality. Even the "dinky" TI-83 can be made to speak PS/2 with one or two KB of assembly code.
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!
Capitalization failures aside, Qazz is correct. I'm working on a direct USB counterpart for the TI-84+ and the TI-84+SE, both of which have a miniUSB port, to enable globalCALCnet with no extra hardware.
Ah, fair enough. I updated the "Global CALCnet 2.2" link that the article points to with some images. http://www.cemetech.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5754
Asking "why" is the wrong question. We do this kind of stuff because we can. I enjoy the challenge of pushing calculator hardware as far as it can go, then a bit further, because it's hard, and therefore rewarding.
Siwelwerd, notice that at this point the hardware I've designed requires a wired connection to a computer with an internet. If I were to make it wireless, or remove the need for a computer, then you might have more of a headache, but I don't think you'll have that much of a problem at this point.
Thanks, Anonymous Coward, although I fear Slashdot users might frown on that sort of shout-out. :)
Thanks! Yesterday I played the latest beta of Obliterate on my calculator with a user in Massachusetts and another in California. If you're going to ask "why", you don't understand the motivations behind calculator coders such as myself.
As far the enthusiast community has been able to figure out, since they make a massive profit on the hardware, what they're mostly selling is a piece of software, namely the calculator's OS. It costs them nothing to replicate that OS ad infinitum, and the only recent updates they've made to it have been poorly-tested and quite buggy, so they have little incentive to improve their calculator line other than pressure from other calculator manufacturers like HP and Casio.
Exactly. I do plenty of coding for high-performance systems for not-fun; it's a fun challenge to kick back and try to challenge myself with a low-resource device. Also, as far as the TI-Nspire goes, it's an extremely locked-down platform, and one on which TI actively discourages third-party development.
Funnily enough, there are a few coders on my website who are thinking about writing some distributed applications with CALCnet2.2 for the fun of it.
Mirror, in case it goes down: http://www.cemetech.net.nyud.net/projects/item.php?id=16 And the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYXVf_6nsGQ
I'd be pretty disappointed for needing to sue them for stealing my idea. :P Not that one guy would have any chance against Microsoft.
How are You Gentlemen?
So does this mean I can run Suse or Lindows on my Palm Pilot now? :)
Yeah, wouldn't want them to use GPS for anything useful, like locating lost hikers or saving lives. This is infinitely more important.
wtf are you talking about? My name is Russell Brown? I think not.
Probably be a good idea to read this in order to find out more about Perl...er, wait, make that >find out about Perl in the first place!