Suggestions for new built-in hardware

[Frozen North]

Suggestions for new built-in hardware

1. A headphone jack

So that audible alerts do not annoy the person next to you.


2. One or more microphones

The main idea is to provide for voice memos to be used as part of program documentation. A secondary purpose is for entering programs where a user can speak names of variables, programs, and results. A programmer can say the name "final velocity" and the calculator can both spell the term and also use repeats of that speech to reference an object. Why more than one microphone? For noise cancellation.


3. A high resolution camera

Say that you're at work and in front of you in a technical manual is a long, complex formula. Do you really want to type that formula into your calculator? No, you want to take a picture of it and have the calculator perform some optical glyph recognition and type it in for you. The same can be done for tabular data, printed or from your computer screen. And it's not to much of a stretch to copy graphical data in much the same manner.


4. An extra SDXC card slot with a pre-loaded 256 GB card

The idea here is to store the entire Wikipedia (updated periodically, automatically) along with a copy of every engineering, business, and scientific text which can be legally obtained for cheap and would be of use in calculations. Formulas inside the texts would be appropriately translated and indexed prior to use. The camera can be used to load additional texts and can also be used to help locate the most relevant text based on an image.


5. Key legend projection

An idea which has already been seen with very high end keyboard, key legend projection is done by having each key formed by movable, clear top and a fixed, OLED display base. The image on the OLED display gives the current function associated with a key press and is under control of the calculator. Each key could have a separate display, or multiple keys could share a single, larger display.