Gauging interest in a DM48 or DM50?

[ben.titmus]

(11-11-2024 12:12 PM)c3d Wrote:  It does not quite explain why SwissMicros changed their attitude towards me around that time, though.

I'm afraid it explains it rather well if you think about it. They were burned with one Open Source project so naturally they will be a lot more cautious about trying another one. Remember that it cost Michael money to make the prototypes for WP43 (as well as opportunity cost).

My guess (and it is just a guess) is that Michael would be willing to consider building hardware for db48x at some point in the future.

If I can give some advice based on issues from the WP43 negotiations...

Don't be precious about insignificant details that nobody other than you will care about. You seem to be very insistent on the name of the calculator in earlier posts on this thread. But remember that Michael has many other calculator offerings and your calculator name will need to fit in there. If you have a number that was used by HP then people may expect the same functionality and interface. If you pick a higher number people might expect more functionality. This is one of the silly issues that almost derailed WP43. You may really care about the name, but almost everyone else would much rather have a physical calculator and they won't care what the name of it is.

Make sure that there won't be significant changes to the keyboard layout in the future. For example, I personally don't like the layout of any of the HP RPL calculators because they prioritise trig functions so much which is fine for certain applications, but not for every application. But more importantly it's quite a deviation from HP RPL calculators (and also the number of functions on db48x) to have a single shift key. Note that R47 (the physical version of C47 that is in the pipeline) which created the single shift key with two shift functions will have two physical shift keys.

I'm more than happy to privately discuss anything that came up with WP43 discussions that might assist your db48x discussions. And I would very much like a SM RPL calculator!