and now for something completely different...

[Nigel (UK)]

The chip looks great - it's easy to get hold of, cheap, and is available in a package with proper pins so that I can solder it without the use of superhuman powers. However, I'm not sure that it would be the best starting point for the design of a scientific calculator.

Calculators need accurate floating-point arithmetic. An excellent library that provides this is the decNumber C library which is freely available and which the WP-34s and WP-31s projects (see elsewhere on this forum) have used. To implement something similar in BASIC would be a huge job and would not be so efficient due the overhead of the BASIC interpreter.

I think that the real issue in designing a calculator is to produce a finished product with a decent keyboard and high standard of construction. Other than re-purposing an existing machine there's no good solution to this that isn't prohibitively expensive (so far as I know).

Nigel (UK)