43s status

[Massimo Gnerucci]

(06-16-2014 07:14 PM)Tugdual Wrote:  

(06-16-2014 06:42 PM)jracca Wrote:  The 42s was fantastic for what it was, a replacement for the 15c.

Wikipedia says "The HP-42S was released as a replacement for the aging HP-41 series"

The 15C was replaced by the 15C LE which I use everyday :-)
Oh by the way that reminds me I have to vacuum clean the Prime...

Wikipedia is wrong. That's how it was marketed.

[walter b]

(06-16-2014 06:42 PM)jracca Wrote:  

(06-16-2014 06:02 PM)jebem Wrote:  But I am acquiring a HP-42S as well, because everybody praises its virtues so much that I feel the need to have one in my collection.

The 42s was fantastic for what it was... The biggest downside is no IO capability.

The only other thing that would have been nice and easy considering the technology of the time is fractions like the 32Sii

The HP-42S is still HP's most powerful RPN calculator you can get (and presumably HP's calculator with the most power per cm^3). There are several threads in the forum antiquum speculating about the reasons why it wasn't allowed to feature more I/O capabilities - please look there if you are interested. And the fraction business began years later, maybe when turning from students to students

[cutterjohn]

I really wouldn't mind a memory limited stack ala 27/28/48/49/50 with a multi line display(color optional, actually probably mono preferred for use in sunlight/bright light plus better batt life, uber sweet would be eink).

2 other things, can't remember if color was being discussed but IIRC multi-line was, anyways if color is being thought of, DON'T skimp like they did on the prime and go w/an SoC w/o a GPU(which would've fixed their disp problems, i.e. redrawing simply), and please don't skimp on RAM/FLASH which IIRC the 43s specs that I saw a while ago either here or on the wiki(don't recall which any longer), as memory's pretty freaking cheap.

SoC again, really wouldn't mind moving on up to -a15/9/8, or even 64b as I can't help but wonder if rockchip, allwinner, etc. wouldn't be about as cheap as say a samsung ARM11. A MIPS SoC might even worth looking at as well, e.g. ingenics line of SoCs(have 2 handheld consoles with ingenics SoCs one a 4730 (IIRC no GPU c. 300-400MHz) and the other the JZ4770(w/GPU, 1GHz). (All of these also have useless blocks(for calcs) on them though, e.g. VPU(video processing units), etc. might be able to buy them with those blocks fused off for even cheaper)

[brouhaha]

The hardware Richard Ottosen and I are developing is targeted to traditional RPN, not RPL, and to long battery life from disposable cells. For that reason it has a 400x240 monochrome LCD, 1MiB of flash, and 128KiB of RAM. An e-ink display would be far worse than what we're using. If you're worried about the screen redraw time on the Prime, that's peanuts compared to the update rate of e-ink.

I don't see any reason to build custom hardware for RPL. Either the 50g or Prime hardware is reasonably suited for that.

I don't understand why you think an RPL calculator needs a GPU. IIf redrawing on the Prime is slow, that's most likely an issue with HP firmware. The CPU in the Prime is more than sufficient to copy 320x240 color bitmaps faster than the LCD can actually refresh. A GPU isn't going to help that at all.

[sa-penguin]

Martin will be sad to read that. Claudio, I'm not so sure:

(06-12-2014 09:37 PM)Claudio L. Wrote:  Here are some additional suggestions, see if you can include them too:
* Cortex A15 processor
* 8 GBytes of RAM
* SSD drive for storage
* GPS Navigation
* Blu-Ray player
* 7.1 Surround sound
* 19" alloy wheels
* Blind-spot monitoring system.

There's nothing stopping any of us making a super-duper Chitty Chitty Bang Bang machine, complete with alloy wheels, fox-tail on the antenna, and chrome-plated grease nipples. Thanks to the Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and Beaglebone Black with their assorted capes and shields, you could mashup something over a weekend.

The problem is: We [or myself at least] don't just want functional - we want PRETTY. Professional-looking. Slim, in a decent case - rather than a stack of boards 5cm [2 inches] tall and a patch cable hooking the keyboard to the CPU. Designing from scratch, making your own boards AND case, is significantly harder.

Just as "an elephant is a mouse deigned by a committee" you have to beware of "feature creep", the desire to satisfy a subset of customers by adding "just one more thing" - which inevitably sets the production process back a few months.

Summary: Dreaming up uber-systems is fun, but I'd take an imperfect 43S, right now. I'd pay for it, knowing the hardware had flaws, just to help fund the next inevitable iteration. [43AS?]

[walter b]

(06-19-2014 06:24 AM)sa-penguin Wrote:  Dreaming up uber-systems is fun, but I'd take an imperfect 43S, right now. I'd pay for it, knowing the hardware had flaws, just to help fund the next inevitable iteration. [43AS?]

Just for sake of grounding:

• The 43S is little more than vapourware (TM) so far. Or call it a Gedankenmodell (i.e. thought model). A pretty elaborate one (332 pages) but nevertheless just a "calculator novel" based on some facts hardly visible to us.
• "knowing the hardware had flaws": said HW will have flaws - it didn't have much opportunity to show flaws yet.
• Iteratively, every reasonable feature within the framework set by Eric below right now may go into the 43S. Everything beyond may go into something else, call it as it pleases you. With a 43S featuring a premium LCD, classic keyboard, low power consumption, a 34S+ function set, true pocketability, and (last not least) RPN, however - what else do you long for?
  

Ooh, and BTW: that word is spelled "über".

d:-)

[sa-penguin]

(06-19-2014 06:57 AM)walter b Wrote:  Ooh, and BTW: that word is spelled "über".

d:-)

I'm a semi-ignorant wuss: I knew about the dots [umlauts?] but couldn't figure out how to produce the desired character.

[Thomas Radtke]

(06-19-2014 08:25 AM)sa-penguin Wrote:  I'm a semi-ignorant wuss: I knew about the dots [umlauts?] but couldn't figure out how to produce the desired character.

In the ASCII-era, I've seen people writing something like u"ber. This was and still is a very elegant solution imo. Today we have a unicode table application on at least Windows - one of the most disregarded programs.

[Paul Dale]

(06-19-2014 10:06 AM)Thomas Radtke Wrote:  Today we have a unicode table application on at least Windows - one of the most disregarded programs.

These exist for Mac and Linux too and are quite handy. For the usual diacritics, Macs have very smooth entry & always have.


- Pauli

[Massimo Gnerucci]

(06-19-2014 10:06 AM)Thomas Radtke Wrote:  

(06-19-2014 08:25 AM)sa-penguin Wrote:  I'm a semi-ignorant wuss: I knew about the dots [umlauts?] but couldn't figure out how to produce the desired character.

In the ASCII-era, I've seen people writing something like u"ber. This was and still is a very elegant solution imo. Today we have a unicode table application on at least Windows - one of the most disregarded programs.

You have ü but then, among the rest, also űǘǚǜ which stand for some nice smiling faces with different hair styles...

[everettr]

(06-19-2014 10:43 AM)Paul Dale Wrote:  For the usual diacritics, Macs have very smooth entry & always have. - Pauli

So what do you recommend for the exceptional diacritics, like those that we have in this forum? :-)

[Sylvain Cote]

(06-19-2014 08:25 AM)sa-penguin Wrote:  I'm a semi-ignorant wuss: I knew about the dots [umlauts?] but couldn't figure out how to produce the desired character.

Another alternative is to use the "U.S. International" keyboard layout.
I have been using this layout for years on Windows, OSX & Linux.

With this layout you produce diacritics by pressing 2 keys like the following ...
a) pressing ' then e generate é
b) pressing ` then a generate à
c) pressing " then u generate ü
d) pressing " then [space] generate "

At work, all documentations must be produced in French but the
programming is done in English so this keyboard layout is perfect.

Sylvain

[Claudio L.]

(06-19-2014 01:25 AM)brouhaha Wrote:  The hardware Richard Ottosen and I are developing is targeted to traditional RPN, not RPL, and to long battery life from disposable cells. For that reason it has a 400x240 monochrome LCD, 1MiB of flash, and 128KiB of RAM. An e-ink display would be far worse than what we're using. If you're worried about the screen redraw time on the Prime, that's peanuts compared to the update rate of e-ink.

I don't see any reason to build custom hardware for RPL. Either the 50g or Prime hardware is reasonably suited for that.

I don't understand why you think an RPL calculator needs a GPU. IIf redrawing on the Prime is slow, that's most likely an issue with HP firmware. The CPU in the Prime is more than sufficient to copy 320x240 color bitmaps faster than the LCD can actually refresh. A GPU isn't going to help that at all.

I agree with most of your ideas. The reason I was asking if you had already chosen a SoC is because as we develop newRPL for the 50g hardware, we could very well make sure it can run on your hardware. I like your choice of screen (nice upgrade from the 50g hardware). However, if your RAM can at least match or exceed the 512 kbytes of the 50g and 2 MBytes of flash, we should be able to make it run without too many changes in the code. Then your project would become more like the "universal calculator hardware", and people would be able to run different ROMs according to what they want from the machine.
Knowing the SoC would help make sure even our low-level stuff remains compatible.

Claudio

[pito]

(06-24-2014 01:11 PM)Claudio L. Wrote:  

(06-19-2014 01:25 AM)brouhaha Wrote:  ..For that reason it has a 400x240 monochrome LCD, 1MiB of flash, and 128KiB of RAM..

..Knowing the SoC would help make sure even our low-level stuff remains compatible.
Claudio

A designer of a calculator today will certainly take an arm or mips based low power MCU, based on the info (1MB flash and 128kB sram) it leads to many possible types available today. There is a single MCU today available with 512kB on chip sram - pic32MZ series, which is still buggy and not very "low power".
You may go ie. with various Cortex M4 chips (max 128-256kB on chip sram), where you can add an external low power SRAM (battery backup-ed) let say 2-4MB of SRAM (single chip) seems to be feasible for a calculator (not talking $$, srams are expensive). The only "issue" of such setup is the access to an external SRAMs is 6-8x slower than to the internal sram - that must not be an issue with a calculator, however..

[Joe Horn]

(06-19-2014 06:57 AM)walter b Wrote:  BTW: that word is spelled "über".

Very OT: For the record, it's spelled that way in German, but "uber" is also a perfectly valid English word, and in English the umlaut is optional, and is almost always left out. We Anglophones love stealing words from everybody else, but we first remove all the diacritics, and even respell them sometimes, and then adopt them as English words. The only word that I ever see with an umlaut in English is "naïve", but actually that's not even an umlaut; it's a dieresis.

[Thomas Klemm]

(06-24-2014 10:46 PM)Joe Horn Wrote:  The only word that I ever see with an umlaut in English is "naïve"

What about Mötley Crüe?

[walter b]

(06-24-2014 10:46 PM)Joe Horn Wrote:  We Anglophones love stealing words from everybody else, but we first remove all the diacritics, and even respell them sometimes, and then adopt them as English words.

Do as you please with your stolen goods (pun intended). An über without ü just looks incomplete to my gut.

d:-)

[Joe Horn]

(06-25-2014 04:36 AM)Thomas Klemm Wrote:  

(06-24-2014 10:46 PM)Joe Horn Wrote:  The only word that I ever see with an umlaut in English is "naïve"

What about Mötley Crüe?

Historical trivia: Before the band had a name, Vince Neil considered it a motley crew (a common English phrase) but then he noticed that their favorite drink at the time was Löwenbräu so he suggested naming the band Motley Crue with "metal umlauts" taken from Löwenbräu. And Löwenbräu, of course, is German.

[brouhaha]

(06-24-2014 01:11 PM)Claudio L. Wrote:  However, if your RAM can at least match or exceed the 512 kbytes of the 50g and 2 MBytes of flash, we should be able to make it run without too many changes in the code. Then your project would become more like the "universal calculator hardware", and people would be able to run different ROMs according to what they want from the machine.
Knowing the SoC would help make sure even our low-level stuff remains compatible.

It's an Energy Micro EFM32GG380F1024, with 1MiB of flash and 128KiB of RAM. The EFM32GG can support additional external memory, but we don't have enough PCB space for that, and it would significantly increase the power consumption. To the best of my knowledge, there is no SoC with 2MiB of flash and 512KiB of RAM that doesn't draw at least an order of magnitude more power than the EFM32GG, so there is basically no chance that we will switch to something with more memory. Also we're not about to throw away our hard-won design expertise with the EFM32 and start from scratch (again!) with some other SoC. We've already restarted the project several times, and if we keep doing that we'll never ship anything.

The HP-28C clearly had nowhere near enough RAM, but the HP-28S was a pretty usable RPL machine with 128KiB of ROM and 32KiB of RAM. Our hardware has eight times as much flash (vs 28S ROM), and four times as much RAM. Even with the increased memory consumption of 32-bit pointers on native ARM vs. 20-bit on Saturn (or Saturn emulated on ARM), its seems that it should be possible to run RPL on it. However, as I said, RPL isn't our target.

We do expect customers to be interested in at least two different firmware choices for our hardware, Free42 and WP-43s. We also have the HP-41CX microcode running on it, but that doesn't map well to the extended Pioneer keyboard layout.

[Paul Dale]

(06-26-2014 08:47 AM)brouhaha Wrote:  It's an Energy Micro EFM32GG380F1024, with 1MiB of flash and 128KiB of RAM. The EFM32GG can support additional external memory, but we don't have enough PCB space for that, and it would significantly increase the power consumption.

No space for a serial, SPI, or I\(^{2}\)C FRAM?
Virtually no power consumption when not active and a small package generally.


I'd really like to include the Intel decimal arithmetic library despite the space it requires.


- Pauli