HP Prime too complicated

[Claudio L.]

(07-12-2018 01:07 PM)roadrunner Wrote:  I've been an engineer since 1979 and around engineers my whole life. I can't think of one time I would have wanted to hook a device up to a calculator to log data; other than just for fun. But that's just me, I can see how that might be useful in an academic environment though.

-road

You probably were in a different kind of engineering. Civil engineers, and in particular surveyors, used calculators as data collectors for many years. Some stations had purpose-built data collectors, but then they had to also carry a calculator with them (seems trivial? try it while walking through rough terrain at 40 deg. slope, with a machete in hand to open a passage, total station, rods, prisms, extra battery packs, all hanging from different parts of your body). The HP48 was king in this type of application, many add-on cards were sold for the 48 for this purpose alone. That was the main reason that drove the price of 48's so high when they discontinued it. People needed reassurance to keep using it as data collector for their >$30000 total stations.
Despite having an SD card, the 50g never quite took that place. Perhaps it was too late in time, total stations started having enough memory to store and log large amounts of data for themselves without needing a separate data logger.