Making the faulty HP-50g alarm function predictable and useful

[Johnny Shek]

(09-30-2024 03:11 PM)0db Wrote:  You're not getting much feedback with this project, but I appreciate your efforts and published results. At this point I've settled on the 50g as my main HP calculator, so I'm interested in anything related to the 50g, but not so much the CAS, as I use Mathematica for that kind of work.

Perhaps, what with smart phones and all, people don't really need to use the 50g for notification alarms, but the control alarms still have some uses, for example, to improve the accuracy of the built-in clock.

Thank you very much for your reply and your praise.

I had searched for topics related to the bug of the HP-50g alarm feature. According to the following link, discussions on it can date back to January 2008, which is the earliest I can find on the net. However, the latest official ROM update 2.15 still cannot fix it! Some users did mention it in some later related discussions but no fix or workaround has been suggested.

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.hp48/c/Pn7xRbcM5Ow

To a lot of users, the alarm feature of an RPL machine is not that important. I just used it for testing recently on the HP-49g+ and the HP-50g since I bought the HP-48SX shortly after it was released. I rely on my physical clock or my mobile phone to wake me up every day. However, the alarm feature in a computing device can be used in so many ways. It would be great if some users find my suggested workaround useful and gain confidence again in using it to adjust the clock, as you say, do routine tasks or control devices.