About the continuous Fourier Transform

[dah145]

(12-09-2020 10:17 PM)medwatt Wrote:  I am the one that created the thread that is referenced a couple of posts above this one. The first time I created the thread, Tom (who apparently is part of the hp team) responded and said it's going to be almost impossible to add the continuous FT function because of copyright reasons. After I contacted the author, who responded very positively, I contacted Tom again several times via PM, but he didn't respond to any of them, even though he used to be responsive to other questions.

I am an electrical engineering student, with a focus on mixed signal design (read microelectronics). You'd be surprised, but I rarely needed a calculator after my circuit analysis class during my undergraduate days. In fact, I'd argue that the Casio 115MS is the best calculator for circuit analysis since it allows you to type and convert complex numbers with the least amount of key strokes. Most of the time, I am deriving equations for which I need the closed form expression of some integral (such as the FT), solution, etc. Also, I hardly need to plot anything trivial. It's nice to see all those beautiful plots that the prime can produce, but are you going to really be plotting parametric equations every day ?

So, why then did I buy the Prime. I was hoping that since it seems so capable, I would be able to do some nice stuff on it and that it might provide python support down the line as I wouldn't call the Prime Language a programming language. I also saw there's a control app for the Prime (written by a 3rd party) that was really enticing. I played with it a bit but realized it was too buggy. Anyway ... my prime has been gathering dust in my drawer for almost a year now.

I understand your sentiment regarding the Prime, but I still believe the potential for this calculator is there.

As of today the Prime can be quite useful for the EE student, and specially in comparison to the other CAS calculators, I would say it the most capable, but that's putting the bar too low, there's a lot of room for improvement. Getting a Bode plot (a simple log scale graph) shouldn't be a programming challenge for example.

It just seems there's no real focus coming from HP for whom exactly this calculator is meant to, and it the end its software feature set is generally lack lustre for the various segments of education it tries to tackle on.

Opening up the development can certainly be a way to fill the voids.