ACT available

[Didier Lachieze]

(04-19-2015 04:34 PM)PANAMATIK Wrote:  This weekend was dedicated to the new ACT, giving it another unprecedented feature:

Printing on the HP82440B Infrared printer

Amazing !!! Will it possible to update the new ACTs in the field?

[Massimo Gnerucci]

Wonderful achievement Bernhard!
Hats off.

[PANAMATIK]

(04-19-2015 04:42 PM)Didier Lachieze Wrote:  

(04-19-2015 04:34 PM)PANAMATIK Wrote:  This weekend was dedicated to the new ACT, giving it another unprecedented feature:

Printing on the HP82240B Infrared printer

Amazing !!! Will it possible to update the new ACTs in the field?

Yes, it will be possible. You need the programmer interface. And you have to solder three very small components to the ACT board. But I think you should need no more skill for it than for the desoldering of an ACT.

I will prepare the IR printing set together with the programmer hardware in the near future for anybody, who is interested. But I need some time for the next release, so please don't order at once.

Bernhard

[walter b]

Sauber, Bernhard! Ich warte noch weiter mit dem Updaten.

Congratulations!

d:-)

[Les Bell]

(04-19-2015 04:34 PM)PANAMATIK Wrote:  Printing on the HP82240B Infrared printer

That's amazing, Bernhard! I doff my hat in admiration!

[brouhaha]

(04-19-2015 04:34 PM)PANAMATIK Wrote:  The infrared range depends on the value of the current limit resistor, according to the Guide 18 Ohm is recommended.

The Guide was written when IR LEDs were a fair bit less efficient than many of the current ones, e.g., the Vishay TSAL4400, which is about three times as efficient as the NEC SE303A listed in the Guide. With a modern IR LED, it should be possible to get adequate range at lower current (using a higher resistor value), which could improve battery life. (That's obviously more of a factor for LCD display calculators than LED, though.)

[PANAMATIK]

Thanks for your congratulations and your hats!

Yesterday I printed the complete HP-25 Application Programs and some more of my own programs to one roll of paper of several meters length for having an archive or just for fun. And there were no! wrong characters printed.

A problem remains to find a place where the IR LED could be placed somewhere in the case of the calculator. I'm thinking of fixing two socket pins somehow at the charging connectors flat vertical wall to plug in the diode when needed. This would limit printing to only when no charger is connected, but would be a nice place. Perhaps it could be also difficult to fix the pins there. Another idea could be to place the diode inside of one of the rubber feet and holding the calculator vertical for printing. Also a cable coming out of the calculator could be possible, which avoids to drill a hole in the calculator.

@brouhaha: You are right, 18 Ohm consumes more current than necessary. I used a 33 Ohm resistor in my hardware. The LED is connected to battery plus 2.6V. And as you mention it does not reduce battery life significantly, because its already a LED calculator.

Bernhard

[Geoff Quickfall]

Spectacular!

I definitely will need to upgrade the ACT to the IR. That will make the 25e fully functional along with the timer and the pseudo-merge ability of the programs.

So when your act flash kit is available I will proceed. Drilling a 1/8 th inch hole in the case at the top or side would be perfect.

I just built 2. WP34s and a WP31 this week fully loaded with clock and IR capabilities bu the magic of LED has captured me.

Thanks Bernhard.

[PANAMATIK]

(04-20-2015 10:45 PM)Geoff Quickfall Wrote:  Spectacular!

I definitely will need to upgrade the ACT to the IR. That will make the 25e fully functional along with the timer and the pseudo-merge ability of the programs.

So when your act flash kit is available I will proceed. Drilling a 1/8 th inch hole in the case at the top or side would be perfect.

I just built 2. WP34s and a WP31 this week fully loaded with clock and IR capabilities bu the magic of LED has captured me.

Thanks Bernhard.

I have already ordered the necessary components for the act flash/IR kit. As soon as the new ACT firmware release is stable I will make an ACT update file available for download. I also will try to add a print trace mode.

"... the magic of LED ...." Yes, that is the right word

With our modern LED technology there could be made also blue, green or white bubble LED displays. But there is no demand and it is utopian that I will see it in my life time. Would be very nice however. Is there some 3d-printer for making LED bubble displays by yourself?

Bernhard

[brouhaha]

(04-21-2015 10:09 PM)PANAMATIK Wrote:  Is there some 3d-printer for making LED bubble displays by yourself?

The typical heated extrusion of plastic filament can be done with tranparent or translucent material, but the result of the process isn't nearly transparent enough for an LED display.

Perhaps there might be some other suitable 3D printing process.

[PANAMATIK]

(04-25-2015 06:45 AM)brouhaha Wrote:  

(04-21-2015 10:09 PM)PANAMATIK Wrote:  Is there some 3d-printer for making LED bubble displays by yourself?

The typical heated extrusion of plastic filament can be done with tranparent or translucent material, but the result of the process isn't nearly transparent enough for an LED display.

Perhaps there might be some other suitable 3D printing process.

I know you are expert in 3-d printing. They are wonderful machines for producing cases and special forms. My science fictionious quest for printing a bubble display at home included also the LED semiconductor part and its bond wires, not only the lens cover. This is still far beyond their capabilities.

Does any lab exist that produces bubble LED displays today? AFAIK the quad red LED bubble display used in the NP-25 HP QDSP6064, offered by sparkfun electronics, was produced long time ago by HP and some items are still on stock. It's the only one I could find. I couldn't find a production year in the data sheet. Does HP know the production year?

An LED calculator made with modern LED technology should have battery life times comparable with smart phones? It could show a two line 12 digit alphanumeric 15-segment display in different colors, running the firmware of the HP-42S or HP-41C.

Bernhard

[PANAMATIK]

The "HP-25E Ir" will trace your calculations now on the HP82240B printer in RUN mode.

I was not sure, whether this could be added, because the flash memory is now really full. I used up every bit of it with size optimized assembler and squeezed data structures. There will be no more new features for the HP-25E in the future, except when removing others, which I don't intend to do. I will spend my next free time with testing all features for the release version 1.04, which includes the IR printer part.

This is a simple "HP-25E Ir" trace output



of the example for "recovering a number" in the HP-25 users manual.



Trace mode can be enabled or disabled with setting/resetting the g GTO 0 8 flag.
(I sacrificed the "show stopwatch at power up" bit for this purpose)

Bernhard

[walter b]

(04-25-2015 01:37 PM)PANAMATIK Wrote:  An LED calculator made with modern LED technology should have battery life times comparable with smart phones? It could show a two line 12 digit alphanumeric 15-segment display in different colors, running the firmware of the HP-42S or HP-41C.

Beyond lighting your way in the dark that would be a step back, especially for the HP-42S which can display more than a 15-segment display can do.

d:-/

[PANAMATIK]

(04-25-2015 02:31 PM)walter b Wrote:  

(04-25-2015 01:37 PM)PANAMATIK Wrote:  An LED calculator made with modern LED technology should have battery life times comparable with smart phones? It could show a two line 12 digit alphanumeric 15-segment display in different colors, running the firmware of the HP-42S or HP-41C.

Beyond lighting your way in the dark that would be a step back, especially for the HP-42S which can display more than a 15-segment display can do.

d:-/

Yes, you are right, for the HP-42S we need some very small 5x7 matrix LED display modules.

Bernhard

[PANAMATIK]

"HP-29E Ir" printing!

After IR printing on HP82240B with the "HP-25E Ir" was already possible since some weeks, today I made the HP-29E ready for printing its 98 program steps in PRGM mode, and I added tracing operations in RUN mode. Because the HP-29 has additional mnemonics and different internal program codes compared to the HP-25, I still had to work on this software part and needed double the time, because the ACT flash program memory is completely full! But finally I got the HP-29E to become a real IR printing device.


I also found the (what I think) best place for the IR diode.



I made only two 1mm drill holes behind the diode, where its pins can be plugged into a socket, which is fixed inside the case. Thus you can remove the diode for charging. Or you don't use the charger at all, because internal charging isn't recommended anyway. Then you can fix the diode at this place without socket. Internally two small wires are connected/soldered to the new ACT.

Next image shows a printout with some typical HP-29C mnemonics like LBL , STO i, RTN etc. without any meaning. I programmed all possible instructions and read the internal program codes by the ACTs serial interface and then implemented a decoder for them.



In about two weeks I will release the IR Version 1.04 for field update.

For anybody, who is interested in how the IR printer is implemented, you can have a look into the source code.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bwx8KUf...sp=sharing

There is also the table of all HP25/ HP29C program step codes for download

http://www.panamatik.de/ProgramCodes.pdf

Bernhard

[Geoff Quickfall]

How many "home runs" (baseball term) are you going to hit :-)

Can't wait to re flash my two 25es' and my 29e to IR printing! I think I will drill a dedicated hole and mount the IR so it protrudes as in the WP34S modifications.

You have changed the 25 / 29 into wonderful tools, instead of a sentimental collectables. One of my programs on the 25e is 125 lines long and the ability to manually merge the 49 step routines allows larger (>48 lines) programs to be input and called in sequence similar to the merge cards of the 67! and very conveniently! I had forgotten how easy it is to "one hand program" the small woodstocks!

Cheers, Geoff

[BobVA]

(05-11-2015 07:49 PM)Geoff Quickfall Wrote:  ...You have changed the 25 / 29 into wonderful tools...

+1 !

I'll be waiting anxiously for the release. Thanks very much for all your hard work!

[PANAMATIK]

(05-12-2015 04:03 AM)BobVA Wrote:  I'll be waiting anxiously for the release. Thanks very much for all your hard work!

The release is not yet finished, but the new manual is finished and can be downloaded now from:

http://www.panamatik.de/ACTManual.pdf

Thanks for your appreciation of my work.
Bernhard

[PANAMATIK]

ACT Update available!

I needed some more days than promised to finish the update Rev. 1.04, which I announced already for end of may. For anyone, who was interested in the new Revision, at least I was able to publish the new ACT 1.04 manual since last week. perhaps you may have read the new chapters and about the new features.

The main steps forward are infrared printing and fast program execution. But there are also some minor improvements, which you can discover by yourself step by step.

Still I cannot be sure, whether I tested every function in any possible constellation for all calculators, but I tried my best. At least I verified, that the same boot loader, that I delivered in all ACTs since January is working correctly. Since I designed it, that it cannot overwrite itself to prevent any data corruption, it would have been very uncomfortable, if I had found some bug later. Fortunately I didn't find a bug. In my tests all update procedures never failed and even transmitting errors or interruptions will not brick your ACT.

But I have to confess, that there is one minor compatibility problem left. If you update your new ACT to Rev 1.04, its serial number will be reset to 00000. Unfortunately I couldn't avoid this problem. I choose a wrong location for the serial number in the previous version. But I can resolve it, I will send everybody, who performs an update, an additional file, which restores his serial number. Further updates (if any) will not have any problems and the serial number will be preserved.

You can download the new ACT Revision as .zip file from my website. It contains all update versions for HP21E to HP-29E and the actupdate.exe program.

http://www.panamatik.de/actupdate.ZIP

Now everybody is free to upgrade to Rev 1.04 and can use infrared printing, if one modifies the ACT according to the instructions in the manual. Alternatively I offer to do the infrared printing modifications for you, if you order the infrared ACT version and don't want to do it by yourself. Please ask by PM.

I need to mention: When you update your ACT with the above standard update files, your user programs, constants and register sets will be cleared and you have to type them in again. However if you don't change the calculator model, it is possible to preserve your programs and registers. In this case ask for an appropriate update file, that only updates the firmware and leaves the user area untouched. When switching from HP-25E to HP-29E etc. or vice versa the programs and registers have to be cleared, because the data structures are not compatible.

There are more than twenty repairs made now and all of them went successful. I hope this series will keep going.

Thank you very much for all your positive response, that I received.

Bernhard

[PANAMATIK]

ACT for HP-34C!

Another challenge is done. The new ACT circuit does now emulate the HP-34C firmware on any woodstock calculator. This means, that you can build now you own HP-34C from a HP-21 or HP-25 hardware, even when using a defective device. There are up to 210 program steps and 20 registers, Labels, Subroutines and the solve function available. All you need is the HP-34C new ACT and a vinyl overlay to stick it on your HP-21 or HP-25 to build the real flagship. Both calculators have the same number of buttons and sliders and the layout is the same. If you use a HP-25 you need only to cover 5 buttons and the panel. I will offer a vinyl overlay for this purpose.

The firmware of the HP-34C is double the size of a HP-29C which was already double of the HP-25. It consumes most part of the flash memory of the new ACT. Therefore there will be no program library and no additional registers, but the complete HP-34C functions. And it will have "Continuous memory" of course. I'm not sure if I manage to include Infrared printing, it could be possible and I will try.

See the two calculators side by side showing a typical HP-34C code at program step 001
"001 - 25 13 5" = h GSB 5

   

The smaller brother of the HP-34C is four times faster than the original!

This could be the chance for you to have your own HP-34C without paying the high prices out there and with a real physical keyboard.

Now I need some time to check every possible functions and verify that they all work correctly and I will add as much of the ACTs new features as possible in the remaining flash memory.

Seems that this weekend was another good one.

Bernhard