Is the 12C SDK still available?

[matthiaspaul]

The good news about the new 12C is that HP hasn't abandoned the 12C - apparently it is still a market where they can make some profit despite all this "calculators are dead", although keeping the 12C alive might also have to do with keeping the "HP calculator fire" burning at all until technically newer products might have earned some reputation somewhen in the future (potential professional-level Prime successors with userRPL? ;-).

Perhaps more interesting for us is the fact that HP hasn't given up on flashability in calculators of this class although (given enough volume) mask-programmed chips are cheaper and for a product as mature as the 12C flashability certainly isn't important. So, either the 12C's sales volume is too low for mask-programming already, or they couldn't trust their quality management (bugs in the firmware would kill the long earned reputation), or they deliberately did this to have a repurposeable platform in this range (hardy only for us, but they might hope for special customers of customized products).

The real question is if HP will bring out a HP 30b replacement with somewhat improved specs (slightly more RAM, flash, and pixels), and will it be reprogrammable as well? If so, they couldn't use the ATSAM4LC2CA, as this controller doesn't have enough I/Os to drive a dot-matrix LC display similar or better than the 30b's display without auxilliary circuits (which would increase costs and power consumption).

Greetings,

Matthias