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."

I miss my graphing calculator

[bit trollent]

I haven't really used my graphing calculator since I graduated from college. I miss using that ti-89. Ahhh the nerdity...

Hey, pretty cool. :)

[nhaines]

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
[e-mail]

Re:No more graphing calcs on tests

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe your "teachers" should be giving you tests that require you to think, rather than just regurgitate canned information from the textbook?

Just a thought.

Re:No more graphing calcs on tests

[andreyw]

...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.

Re:Eureka!

[Zarel]

Or a not so shitty mp3 player [ticalc.org], for that matter.

Re:Eureka!

[pantherace]

It'd be relatively easy to do. The back of the calculator, is mostly just empty space filled with a grid of plastic. One could remove that, and store it there, with little to no visual evidence. I'd be surprised if the weight change would be noticible.

TI calculators are woefully obsolete

[Doppler00]

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...

Re:TI calculators are woefully obsolete

[necro81]

A calculator with a comparable set of capabilities to MATLAB, etc., even with the same monochrome screen, probably wouldn't last too long on a set of AAAs. Even back when I was using my TI-83 for long problem sets in college, I could still get months of daily use, probably a few hundred hours, out of a single set of batteries. No portable device of such power and flexibility can come close.

I'll concede the point about the price-point, though. For $100 you can get an entry-level PDA [palm.com] with color screen. It won't be nearly as rock-solid reliable, though, nor have as much of a user base and support.

I agree that they don't seem to have changed much over the last decade. But, I would contend that a a TI graphing calculator can do an aweful lot. I'm not talking about graphing a Calabi-Yau [wikipedia.org] manifold, or something handled by one of Matlab's extensive toolboxes [mathworks.com], but the actual manipulation and display of numbers and algebra. What do you wish they could do that they don't do now? If you'll look at user-pages for TI and other graphing calculators, you'll see that people have been able to program them to do amazingly complex things.

I don't use my graphing calculator for much these days, but that's mostly because it would take me less time to use MATLAB, mainly due to having a full-sized screen, keyboard and mouse.