When will the firmware for the DM42 be updated?

[zeno333]

It was last updated in October, 2022. Could someone contact and put some tactful pressure on them to update it. People invested in one and we need an update.

[jthole]

Why do we “need” an update? What’s not working?

I guess the small team is fully occupied with the DM32 at the moment.

The SwissMicros forum is your best place for information.

[zeno333]

(02-16-2024 06:45 AM)jthole Wrote:  Why do we “need” an update? What’s not working?

I guess the small team is fully occupied with the DM32 at the moment.

The SwissMicros forum is your best place for information.

What is not working is not the point. The Free42 software gets updates for reasons, and since the DM42 is based on the Free42 calculator, the reasons for the Free42 updates are the same reasons for a DM42 update.

[Thomas Okken]

• Better sign reversal detection in SOLVE
• New FUNC implementation, which protects the caller's RPN stack from operations like R↓ or CLST even in NSTK mode
• EDIT, EDITN, and INDEX now support editing lists, empty lists, nested lists, and matrices inside lists
• NN→S function: converts numbers to strings at full precision
  

There's more, but regardless, DM42 being at a Free42 version that is 16 months old is not great.

[Werner]

Better look on Swissmicro's forum for a partial answer.
Werner

[Peet]

(02-16-2024 05:38 AM)zeno333 Wrote:  It was last updated in October, 2022. Could someone contact and put some tactful pressure on them to update it. People invested in one and we need an update.

The DM41X has known bugs and has not received any updates since 2020.

In contrast to the DM42, it doesn't even have the latest DMCP (v3.20 instead of v3.24), even though it's the more expensive calculator.

I think you can still live with the status quo on both computers, even if it pushes them a little towards abandonware.

P.S. How many updates did the HP-42s have? If something is good, we doesn't necessarily need an update.

[Thomas Okken]

(02-16-2024 04:48 PM)Peet Wrote:  P.S. How many updates did the HP-42s have? If something is good, we doesn't necessarily need an update.

Irrelevant. HP never promised updates. SwissMicros did. There's nothing wrong with criticizing them for not sticking to their own schedule.

Of course Free42 is good ;-) but that doesn't mean it doesn't have bugs that need fixing and improvements that should be made. Right now the DM42 is 16 months behind Free42, and just because you don't think it's worthwhile keeping the two in sync doesn't mean everybody feels that way, and it generally simply isn't OK to renege on your support commitments.

N.B. You can reply to this by posting a reply, that makes the argument easier to follow for the other forum readers than if you modify your posts after they've been replied to.

[rexbinary]

(02-16-2024 05:38 AM)zeno333 Wrote:  It was last updated in October, 2022. Could someone contact and put some tactful pressure on them to update it. People invested in one and we need an update.

How about you contact and pressure them yourself? Personally, I don't care if they ever update it. Mine works fine.

[Slasher006]

Oh i can top the demand! :-P

I need 3 updates! For the DM42, DM41X and DM32.

Look at them:

   

sitting there. Alone... and updateless!

[brouhaha]

Firmware updates are available every other day.

Quote:“Twopence a week and jam every other day.”

Alice couldn’t help laughing as she said, “I don’t want you to hire me—and I don’t care for jam.”

“It’s very good jam,” said the queen.

“Well, I don’t want any today, at any rate.”

“You couldn’t have it if you did want it,” the queen said. “The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday—but never jam today.”

“It must come sometimes to ‘jam today,’ ” Alice objected.

“No, it can’t,” said the queen. “It’s jam every other day: today isn’t any other day, you know.”

– Lewis Carroll

[MinkLib]

I love it!

You guys probably knew that Lewis Carroll was an Oxford mathematician first, best-selling chidren's author after. There's a great story that Queen Victoria, having been enthralled reading Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, asked him to dedicate his next book to her.
He did: a new method of solving matrices or something like that. She was not amused..

For sure Lewis would have enjoyed an HP RPN calculator if they had been invented a century earlier.

[brouhaha]

On a more serious note, it should be possible to compile your own unofficial DM42 firmware using a newer version of Free42. That's why SwissMicros split the firmware into their DMCP operating system, which is closed course but has a documented API, and the "application", which is the open-source Free42. Not to put to fine a point on it, but for anyone who isn't familiar with the licensing issues, this is EXACTLY why there was the huge flame war in this forum over whether SwissMicros should honor the terms of the GPL license of Free42, and why Thomas was absolutely correct to insist that they needed to do so. There were a lot of apologists for the license noncompliance point of view, and we are lucky that their view did not prevail.

That said, I haven't yet tried to compile it myself for the DM42 platform. But AFAIK, I was the first person to run Free42 on an _actual_ calculator hardware (for a loose definition of "actual"), when I had it running on the "DIYRPN 5" hardware that the late Rich Ottosen and I collaborated on. The electronics was actually quite similar to the later DM42, just using a different ARM microcontroller, but the same LCD display. This was presented at an HHC conference about ten years ago. I modified Free42 for the multi line display, and provided the patches to Thomas; I don't know whether he used my patches, or wrote something better.

[brouhaha]

By the way, I am not in any sense disagreeing with the point that SwissMicros _should_ put together an updated official DM42 firmware build.

[Thomas Okken]

(02-20-2024 11:13 PM)brouhaha Wrote:  I modified Free42 for the multi line display, and provided the patches to Thomas; I don't know whether he used my patches, or wrote something better.

I never used those patches, nor did I use the ones created by Byron Foster in his 42s iPhone port, nor the ones created by SwissMicros for the DM42. My take was that Free42 should be as similar as possible to the HP-42S as far as the user interface was concerned. I wanted HP-42S users to be able to use Free42 without having to deal with any quirks or incompatibilities.

When I decided to write Plus42, it was going to include a lot of the functionality I had always felt was inappropriate for Free42, including the multi-line display. I did like the DM42 multi-line display logic, but I also felt that it had some shortcomings that were not acceptable, like certain inconsistencies in the program editor. And I also had some ideas of my own, regarding how to take advantage of the big display for command entry, number entry, multi-line messages, and large objects in the X register.

So, I ended up writing the big display logic for Plus42 from scratch. It turned out that getting everything to behave the way I wanted it to required some serious surgery to the Free42 display logic.

I am happy with how the Plus42 big display turned out, but it ended up being so different from Free42 that I suspect that this logic will be the biggest challenge for anyone wanting to port Plus42 to the DM42. The DM42 big-screen patches would probably have to be redone almost from scratch.

[brouhaha]

I'm willing to share my Free42 multiline patches if anyone wants them. They seemed to work reasonably well both on the prototype hardware, and when built for Linux.
I haven't kept up with Free42 changes since then, so it might take a bit of effort to bring them up to date.
In the more general sense, though, I think anyone sufficiently motivated would be better off working with Plus42.

[BruceH]

(02-16-2024 08:17 AM)Thomas Okken Wrote:  

• Better sign reversal detection in SOLVE
• New FUNC implementation, which protects the caller's RPN stack from operations like R↓ or CLST even in NSTK mode
• EDIT, EDITN, and INDEX now support editing lists, empty lists, nested lists, and matrices inside lists
• NN→S function: converts numbers to strings at full precision
  

There's more, but regardless, DM42 being at a Free42 version that is 16 months old is not great.

I thought I would have a go at creating an updated DM42 image.

Baby steps first so I've started by building Free 42 3.1.4 on Linux but I'm struggling to find any of these new features. For example: I use shift+PRGM to start a new program, press Shift+CATALOG to bring up the list of commands, down arrow to the F's looking for FUNC but it's not there.

Did I build the wrong version? is it only available in NSTK mode? Something else?

[Thomas Okken]

The Free42 extensions aren't in CATALOG → FCN any more. The CATALOG menu has multiple rows now, and the extra functions are in several submenus in the second and third rows of CATALOG.

The submenus roughly correspond to the sections under https://thomasokken.com/free42/#extensions

[BruceH]

Firstly, thank-you very much for your answer Thomas.

I realise now I'd mis-read your previous reply and thought that FUNC itself was new, not that it previously existed and had been extended. So I'd looked (in the wrong place) on the DM42 and not found it and then did the same on the Linux build of the newer version and wondered why I still couldn't find it. D'oh!