NumWorks open source calculator

[JDW]

My first HP was the 28S I purchased in 1989 when I entered engineering school. I later purchased a 48GX and FRAM card and a 50g. I still use all the calculators as an electrical engineer. Some may call me a collector in that I have 3 top end HP calculators (top end in their day), which even most geeks don't have. But I still am practical. So while I appreciate the explanation, since it isn't something practical, it is not something that would compel me to try it. Thank you for explaining though.

[Nigel (UK)]

There may be a practical point to this. If NumWorks can be installed, why not (in the future) something like NewRPL? Personally I love the Prime as it is, but I can quite understand people wanting to use its great hardware for other purposes.

Nigel (UK)

[JDW]

It seems we need to define the word "practical." They fellow who posted prior to my last post say this:

"There is no practical reason to it."

My interpretation of that rather bold and matter-of-fact statement is this:

"Installing NumWorks on a Prime doesn't work well or at all, hence installing it is not practical."

But if indeed installing NumWorks on a Prime makes a Prime function as perfectly as NumWorks hardware, then I myself would say it that doing so is very practical. Whether it is better than the Prime or not is a totally separate matter. We are talking about what is practical, functional, usable here. At least I am.

[Jean-Baptiste Boric]

(07-07-2018 10:30 PM)JDW Wrote:  

(06-05-2018 08:12 PM)critor Wrote:  Thanks to Jean Baptiste Boric, the NumWorks firmware is now available for your HP Prime calculator...

What's the point of running NumWorks firmware on a Prime unless that firmware makes the Prime a better calculator? Does it?

Because I can.

That doesn't mean you should for now (my NumWorks port doesn't know how to turn off the calculator yet, among other things).

[JDW]

Sounds a bit like newRPL on the 50g.

Promising but not ready for Prime time. :-)

Thanks for letting me know.

[toml_12953]

(07-10-2018 12:04 AM)JDW Wrote:  Promising but not ready for Prime time. :-)

Oh, brother! <groan>

[Eddie W. Shore]

For those of you that have a NumWorks calculator, is it worth the price?

[Jean-Baptiste Boric]

(07-10-2018 12:59 PM)Eddie W. Shore Wrote:  For those of you that have a NumWorks calculator, is it worth the price?

I'm not really the right person to answer this question since I bought the NumWorks on a whim when it was released just to tinker with it and I've had way too much fun doing it, but I'll try. I also happen to have a HP Prime to compare to.

Hardware-wise from a consumer's perspective, it's one of the fastest graphing calculator out there (I ran some benchmarks with my NumWorks port on the HP Prime and they're basically the same*). The case is sturdy, the screen is bright but colors are a bit washed off. The keyboard is... usable, but it's certainly no HP (I think it's not as good as my old TI-82 Stats.fr either).

Software-wise from a consumer's perspective, it has come a LONG way since last year (natural writing, equation solver, Python scripts transfer, exact math engine and too many other things to list) with regular official updates at most two months apart. Feature-wise it's perfect for high-school but it is lacking for engineering/programming/financial/university workloads. Lack of integration between applications is a real bummer, you can only transfer Python programs and their size are limited at 4 KiB total.

From a technical perspective, the only real sore points are the RAM (256 KiB) and Flash (1 MiB) capacity. It's certainly enough for high-school, but adding Giac (which people did manage to do) requires soldering a SPI Flash chip. Increasing the RAM means changing the SoC, which is doable but not for the faint of the heart. Otherwise it's fairly boring hardware, which is a very good thing. The pricing war in France makes the Casio 90+E technically a better deal for the price hardware-wise but only because NumWorks made them drop their price in the first place. The source code is nice, stable and modern but it's still a very young firmware when compared to the competition.

From a tinkerer's perspective, it's THE dream calculator. It is thoroughly documented, hardware mods are a breeze, debugging is as easy as on a PC with a STlink, the source code for the entire firmware is available and you can customize/add features to your heart's content.

In short... for it's intended target (high-school) it's pretty much spot-on as with tinkerers. Professionals and HP hardcore fans like my father will still cling to their beloved HP-42S or the HP-35s until their death, but you can turn it into the calculator of your dreams if you truly want to. The NumWorks team has so far an update schedule, improvement speed and reactivity that would make any HP Prime user drool. It is still very young, but has lots of potential and room to grow, especially if a more powerful model targeted at university comes out in a couple of years.

I'll gladly answer if you have more specific questions (I'm one of the most hardcore NumWorks tinkerers out there) and you can also ask the NumWorks team or community directly on the Reddit forum (http://www.reddit.com/r/numworks). Also check out the online simulator (http://www.numworks.com/simulator/) to get a feel of the firmware.

* Well, technically my HP Prime port uses software floating point and does not take advantage of the FPU in the S3C2416, but raw integer performance is mostly tied.

[Claudio L.]

(07-10-2018 05:30 PM)Jean-Baptiste Boric Wrote:  * Well, technically my HP Prime port uses software floating point and does not take advantage of the FPU in the S3C2416, but raw integer performance is mostly tied.

As far as I know, there's no FPU on the S3C2416.

[Jean-Baptiste Boric]

(07-10-2018 08:11 PM)Claudio L. Wrote:  

(07-10-2018 05:30 PM)Jean-Baptiste Boric Wrote:  * Well, technically my HP Prime port uses software floating point and does not take advantage of the FPU in the S3C2416, but raw integer performance is mostly tied.

As far as I know, there's no FPU on the S3C2416.

The S3C2416 has an ARM926EJ core. I'm fairly sure it has VFP since HP's own firmware has lots of VFP instructions inside armfir.elf (well, they could trap and fallback to softfp emulation, but I do hope they haven't done something that backwards). It's just that by the time PRIME_OS.ROM runs, VFP hasn't been enabled yet and I was not in the mood to meddle with black magic processor state.

[pier4r]

(07-07-2018 10:30 PM)JDW Wrote:  What's the point of running NumWorks firmware on a Prime unless that firmware makes the Prime a better calculator? Does it?

Others provided already some good replies, but whenever one posts such a question, one can apply the question to this very forum.

What's the point of following a forum about calculator? If you try to ask a random person on the internet (say FB) "what do you think about someone spending his free time on a calculator forum?" people will smile in the best case and laugh in the worst.
(I find this forum pretty interesting, but it is surely out of the mainstream radar regarding "interesting things")

Therefore of all places it is surprising to get such questions in this forum, as this very forum is for people that have fun (or extract values from) doing some very niche activities compared to the general population.

[JDW]

(07-11-2018 11:09 AM)pier4r Wrote:  What's the point of following a forum about calculator?

I can easily answer that. I am an HP calculator enthusiast, so when I see a need in my family for a new calculator, I naturally consider HP calculators first, and where on the internet is there a more comprehensive set of information and a more active community of HP calculator users than this forum? Hence, I come here to research and to ask questions of the experts. My time is never wasted. It's always a productive learning experience. And in the end, I am helped in making a calculator purchasing decision, helped in fixing problems with my existing calculators, or helped in getting the most from my existing calculators.

[pier4r]

(07-12-2018 12:03 AM)JDW Wrote:  I can easily answer that.

I have no doubt you have your reasons to use this forum, otherwise you wouldn't use it. Mine was more of a critic.

You criticized the point of doing an activity that you find not useful, but only through your eyes. Someone can easily do the same about the activity "checking the hp museum forum".

Example:
"JWD why do you check a calculator forum?".
"because <insert answer>".
"I find it a waste of time, just buy a casio 25$ calculator and that's it. For the rest there is wolfram alpha or smartphones".
"Well I don't agree because <insert argument>".
"Nah, I am pretty sure most people would agree with me (i), dismissed".

Now you provided an answer why you use this forum, couldn't you extend that to anything anyone does? (that is not harmful(ii) for others) Like "why does one do X? Because X is interesting for that person". In this particular case porting an OS from a platform to another is quite a challenge.

(i) And they would. Let's not be delusional here, the majority of the population sees high end calculators as pointless. All the more the discussion about them.
(ii) for some values of harmful.

[JDW]

(07-14-2018 10:33 AM)pier4r Wrote:  "I find it a waste of time, just buy a casio 25$ calculator and that's it. For the rest there is wolfram alpha or smartphones".

**DEEP SIGH**

To each his own, but I shall point out that Wolfram Alpha, Computers and Smart Phones are not on the College Board list of approved calculators for the SAT (which applies to High School students, and which applies to me as a father of one), which is why overpriced calculators that still use very old tech like the TI-83 Plus are still used and even recommended by American schools.

And so, people still need calculators due to standardized testing, and therefore online forums like this one exist to help people searching for the best calculator (for themselves or their children) to find the answers they need.

Someone may then criticize standardized testing or criticize the moon for merely existing. Who cares? We rant about what we rant about and move on. Let's do that now -- move on.

If you like emulating other calculators on a Prime, more power to you. I am not standing in your way. Ditto for people who want to emulate a Prime on a NUMWORKS. My goodness... I am standing in no man's way! I'm not even criticizing you for doing that. I am not criticizing anyone for merely liking that. I simply said it's not for me in that I don't get the point, and for daring to say that, here I am defending myself from ongoing criticism!! Ack!

[pier4r]

(07-14-2018 01:41 PM)JDW Wrote:  Ditto for people who want to emulate a Prime on a NUMWORKS. My goodness... I am standing in no man's way! I'm not even criticizing you for doing that. I am not criticizing anyone for merely liking that. I simply said it's not for me in that I don't get the point, and for daring to say that, here I am defending myself from ongoing criticism!! Ack!

Then my bad, I misunderstood your posts. It happens.

[JDW]

(07-10-2018 12:59 PM)Eddie W. Shore Wrote:  For those of you that have a NumWorks calculator, is it worth the price?

I don't own the NUMWORKS but I wrote the company a few times asking when it would appear on the College Board list of approved calculators, and they contend it will show up there next month. It's also interesting in that it is approved for the ACT as well as the SAT, whereas the Prime is only allowed on the SAT. The NUMWORKS also has basic CAS, which upon investigation isn't really CAS at all in that it won't solve equations like the Prime and 50g will. But despite having CAS, the Prime is still approved for the SAT.

I have a daughter in 10th grade and a son in 7th, and I've been looking for a College Board SAT-approved calculator. Ultimately I decided to go with the Prime even though my daughter feels the NUMWORKS looks cleaner, simpler and more fun to her eyes. She actually made the final decision. If the NUMWORKS had a complete CAS like the Prime, she would have chosen the NUMWORKS. But the Prime won because it has a richer set of CAS features. And since the Prime is allowed on the SAT, why not get it, right?

So I ordered 2 Prime's from Walmart, since they currently have the lowest price I could find, which is about $118. I spotted a $116 price on Amazon, but from a very fishy marketplace seller which from the user comments I learned that they import a Spanish version and sell it cheaply. The calculator would still work in English, but all the printed materials (and what few they are!) would be in unusable Spanish. At least with the Walmart version you know its in English. And the Walmart version is the one marked 2016 which has the darker print on the keys (the newest version of the Prime).

Technically, they could improve the NUMWORKS calculator in the future to include a richer CAS, but in terms of what it has now, the Prime beats it.

[compsystems]

NumWorks 2019

https://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=244487

[debrouxl]

To sum up (critor's TI-Planet article is a good read, as usual, and it contains quite a bit more than what follows - you should still click on the link ):
* STM32F4 @ 100 MHz -> STM32F7 @ 216 MHz;
* 1 MB internal NOR Flash + an area on the PCB to solder a QSPI NOR Flash chip -> 64 KB internal NOR Flash + 8 MB of external QSPI NOR Flash, i.e. quite a bit more than the size of a high-featured build of giac;
* still 256 KB of RAM, so giac can't operate on expressions as complicated as it can on the Prime (standard OS), the Nspire series / some Casio models (under the KhiCAS form), but it can work;
* apparently a slightly better screen;
* thicker front cover;
* no longer directly moddable hardware.

[compsystems]

New review

[DMaier]

Just wondering if anyone has been able to find the N0110? Amazon seems to be shipping the N0100. (Adafruit is also shipping the N0100, but perhaps that's because their market is the folks who want to hack the device?)

NumWorks doesn't ship to Canada (annoying, but not uncommon with small manufacturers); however, it appears that when you order from them you can't tell which model you are ordering, which is a bit surprising (perhaps they have an inventory of unsold N0100's they now need to shift?).