NEW: HP 15C Collectors Edition

[ajay_m]

To be clear here I don't think an actual RTC is needed i.e absolute time and tracks when calculator is off. What would be awesome is a stopwatch (relative time) but with the sophistication of the calculator. For example, I am coaching a bunch of young athletes. I use the device to capture lap times, accumulating each result same as sigma + would do, and at the end I have mean, standard deviation, min, max etc. which can all be captured to memory. When I get home I plug in the programming cable and download the results to my computer.

Now sure, my phone has a stopwatch. It can't do anything like this level of sophistication though, and because it's a touchscreen, I can't just hold it one hand without looking with my finger poised over the button to capture results.

Assuming that the device is crystal controlled, which I'm almost certain would be the case these days, then you should always be able to calculate relative time accurately, and most processors have an internal hi-res counter anyway (Intel/AMD CPUs do, would depend on the specific ARM SoC I imagine).

Anyway, there are just tons of places where you want to capture periodic phenomena. Another one would be a naturalist who wants to record the time between each time a bird sings, which would otherwise require recording everything and then analysing the recording later on, or someone monitoring the period of a piece of equipment like a turning wind turbine blade, etc, etc, where having relative time analysis would be just incredibly useful. (e.g if I time one rotation of the blades, I can immediately calculate rpm).

Then as I said before you have physics students doing the classical pendulum experiments, where being able to capture the period this way and feed the results directly into statistical analysis would be incredibly handy. You could just create a new HP17C (in the spirit of the HP55) that, like the HP16C, is domain-focussed, and give it an overlay, of course. In that case I'd beef up the statistics and also have solve be able to solve for a local minimum not just zero i.e given a set of results, show me the min (or possibly max) [given I can write a programmable function that given x returns f(x) = xth sample point, or it could be a continuous function, but either way I'd like to solve for a local min/max within the range, not just zero, which feels a bit constraining].

This sort of stuff is where the 'use a computer' argument kind of falls away. It's actually pretty awkward to do that, apart from the obvious fluidity of capturing results this way, having the local analysis really adds value, sure, I can ultimately whap this stuff into Excel but if I can do the obvious stuff on the machine, I have a really useful solution that justifies a handheld device. I really never understood why HP didn't develop the idea beyond the HP55.