HP 15c CE - New firmware update officially available!

[AnnoyedOne]

I've just joined this site and this is my first post. As a consequence I'll introduce myself.

I'm a retired electronic (electrical in the US) engineer. However I've been playing with electronics/computers/etc since I was 9. I was given a number of electronic kits as birthday/christmas presents during my youth.

In the March 1982, while studying to be an engineer, I purchased a brand new HP-15C at my university bookshop. I used it as a student, continually, and during my professional engineering career and still have it (and it still works!). It's pretty much "mint" (except for the pouch) and original except for the LR44 batteries. The same for the (original printed) manuals.

In July 1985 I purchased a HP-16C, at a good price, mail order. At the time I was writing 6809/68000 code in assembler and C so it came in handy. I still have it too and it also works fine.

I called myself an "embedded systems engineer" in my later years since I both designed hardware, built it, and wrote firmware/software. About equal parts of each. In the 80's I used mostly Motorola 68xx processors and wrote code in assembler. Later I moved to 16-bit and later 32-bit CPU's. Before retiring I was designing custom systems using ARM Cortex based SoC (System on Chip) devices. I used professional tools (compilers/debuggers/programmers). Most code was written from scratch (low-level hardware up).

That said I did this *professionally*. That is as paid work not as a hobbyist. Being retired I no longer do this stuff, or am interested, but am (obviously) very familiar with it. These days I'm an "end user" albeit one with a lot of knowledge.

Which brings me to the HP-15C CE.

I never knew about the HP-15C LE etc until some years ago. As I result I found a copy of the genuine HP-15C PC emulator that came out around that time. The version I have is free. It is no longer on HP's site but it is easily found on archive.org etc. I also have an early version of the HP-15C emulator for Android from around the same period. My tablet is old and obsolete and will NOT run the newer versions.

When I heard about the HP-15C CE I purchased one more for nostalgia than anything else. It sits, in the original (but opened) box, in a closet. I rarely use calculators (any) these days. When I do it is mainly for basic arithmetic.

My HP-15C CE does not exhibit any "key bounce" issues. Typically I used 20-100mS debounce times in my code (depending on the implementation). 120ms seems excessive to me.

So when a firmware update came out for the HP-15C CE recently the only thing that interested me was the ability to save/restore memory. However I didn't have a programming cable.

I have now ordered one. Neither my original HP-15C/HP-16C or emulators can save/restore memory. The two HP emulators use files (HP15CState.bin for the PC one)
to implement "constant memory". One could copy/rename files to achieve save/restore functionality but I've never bothered.

Since the HP-15C CE is pretty much unused I don't "need" the programming cable. However I'll have one. The 120mS "key debounce fix" and HP-16C mode "decimal fix" are of little interest to me. However the memory save/restore functionality may come in useful at some point.

Regards to all,

A1