43s status

[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