Porting the NumWorks firmware to the HP Prime

[Jean-Baptiste Boric]

Title says it all. It's still in the early stages, but it does calculate.

https://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php...0&p=232286 (news, french)
https://tiplanet.org/forum/gallery/image...ge_id=9606 (gallery, french)
https://github.com/numworks/epsilon/pull/534

[tcab]

Wow! This is quite astonishing. Please keep updating as things progress

[Jean-Baptiste Boric]

Got the brightness control, LEDs and right parentheses insertion done. I'm running out of easy stuff to do...

Also, update 1.6.0 makes the fully-featured firmware grow to 988 KiB, very close to the 1 MiB limit of PRIME_OS.ROM. I can sidestep this with my GDB stub over the UART, but we'll need a solution for mere mortals soon...

I have a GitHub issue to track my progress here: https://github.com/boricj/epsilon/issues/1

[pier4r]

1st: kudos for the work!
2nd: it is impressive how much the french communities does for calculators
3rd: Wait a moment. Has the prime only 1 Mib of internal storage for the firmware? (I am still impressed how people packs amazing stuff in so little space)
4th: is your Rom using the full keyboard of the prime.. ok read the github thread (nice!), it is not based on the real hardware yet.

5th: in the github thread debrouxl said that the HP prime is an unpopular calculator. (he is also registered here). I would be interested if that is the case.

The ti8x and casios were the king before the prime. Nonetheless the "unpopular" 50g & co I guess sold enough to keep it running until the main chip (a samsung chip) went out of production.

I am not sure where now the nspire or the casios are more popular than the prime, as the prime is not different from the others in terms of usages. I would bet aside from some countries they should divided the market equally more or less.

Plus from time to time we have reports of prime out of stock. Either HP is slowly stopping the production, or people buy them (although to let them end in a drawer or worse in a bin, sob).

[Jean-Baptiste Boric]

The HP Prime has 256 MiB of Flash. While I develop with a GDB stub that can (slowly) load ELF images as big as the RAM through the UART, replacing PRIME_OS.ROM is currently the only option for others and it's only 1 MiB to work with.

I've mapped most of the obvious keys combinations I could to their closest epsilon internal event equivalent. I could map more of them to concepts epsilon knows about like shift-home switching to the Settings app with more intrusive changes to the code, but I stick to a vanilla port for now. However, the HP Prime and the NumWorks have wildly different UI, featuresets and software philosophies. The keyboards are reasonably close enough that it mostly works out in practice (the TI-83 Premium CE would've been a nightmare to map), but it'll never be perfect: what should I map the CAS key to for example?

As for popularity, it's hard to tell how popular in relative and absolute terms the HP Prime really is. It probably varies quite a bit by country. Also, there's not only the physical item to consider, but also the various mobile apps and paid versions.

What is obvious is that the HP Prime platform overall is at the very least not an outright commercial failure otherwise HP would've pulled the plug a long time ago. Beyond that, I don't have any data points to speculate/extrapolate so I won't try to. But sellers that don't sell lots of HP Prime will not stock a lot of them in advance and they will tend to run out of units until they get to restock (possibly waiting on a production batch to complete and ship too) on a semi-regular basis, so I wouldn't worry too much about that as long as it's not a global shortage.

[eried]

This is so cool! Imagine somebody ports the prime to the numworks, then you have both calculators but with swapped fw

[compsystems]

better if someone port newrpl to numworks or prime calculators

[Claudio L.]

(06-15-2018 09:57 PM)eried Wrote:  This is so cool! Imagine somebody ports the prime to the numworks, then you have both calculators but with swapped fw

With the Prime being closed source, you can't "port" it anywhere, it would be called "illegally-hijack-intellectual-property the Prime to the Numworks hardware" but I get the coolness of your point.