HP-41 Literature - German

[Martin Hepperle]

Dear HP-41 users,

here is some information possibly of interest for German HP-41 users (or if you want to improve your German):

After consulting the publisher (Heldermann Verlag) I have scanned four HP-41 books and made them available on the web in two places:
a) Warren Furlow's HP-41 site (I thought that this is the best place for this very HP-41 specific stuff)
b) for a limited time on my own web site at http://www.mh-aerotools.de/hp

Three of the books are translations of the well known "standards" (Wickes, Dearing, Jarett) but the 4th is a exhaustive German book on HP-41 bar codes with many programs.

I used the latter to write a PC program to read/convert/print barcodes from scanned pages of barcodes without having to resort to a hardware reader (wand). If this is of interest, I can make the program also available on my web site.

Martin

[Marcus von Cube]

Danke! Jetzt brauche ich nur noch Zeit, sie zu lesen...

[aurelio]

(11-07-2014 02:00 PM)Martin Hepperle Wrote:  Dear HP-41 users,

here is some information possibly of interest for German HP-41 users (or if you want to improve your German):

After consulting the publisher (Heldermann Verlag) I have scanned four HP-41 books and made them available on the web in two places:
a) Warren Furlow's HP-41 site (I thought that this is the best place for this very HP-41 specific stuff)
b) for a limited time on my own web site at http://www.mh-aerotools.de/hp/heldermann.htm

Three of the books are translations of the well known "standards" (Wickes, Dearing, Jarett) but the 4th is a exhaustive German book on HP-41 bar codes with many programs.

I used the latter to write a PC program to read/convert/print barcodes from scanned pages of barcodes without having to resort to a hardware reader (wand). If this is of interest, I can make the program also available on my web site.

Martin

THE PROGRAM IS OF COURSE INTERESTING AND WELCOME (THANK-YOU SO MUCH IN ADVANCE)

Did you try to read with a wand any of the barcodes printed from your scan?
I printed five random pages and I found that a few works but not all...checksum problem...... the quality of the scan is the same.....i printed with a laser b/w printer...is there any trick?

[Karl-Ludwig Butte]

Hi Martin,

thank you very much for your work scanning and these books and publishing them on your web site. This is a great addition to my collection - I only have the book of W.C. Wickes in paper form.

Your PC program is of great interest to me, too. Thank you very much in advance.

Best regards

Karl

[Martin Hepperle]

Okay folks,

even if this is still work in progress, I have placed a copy of my barcode decoder program on my web site under
http://www.mh-aerotools.de/hp/bcreader.htm.

The program is stable and I have made many tests with all kind of barcodes. The working version outputs a lot of debug information if you start it from a command window resp. console window.

On the web page you will find a description of what the program does and a ZIP archive with the application and some test images.
My plan is to make the sources available later, when everything is closer to a final "product".

Notes:
A) You will need Java (I test with 1.7 or higher) and should be able to run the application on any system with a suitable Java runtime environment (JRE).
B) The program is no HP-41 emulator or compiler - it was intended to be able to decode programs and data printed in barcode form. It also decodes some of the keyboard, alpha and direct execution codes but not all possible variants as this is of no interest for me. If you need this feature, I propose another device, called HP-41 ;-).

If you have ideas for improvement and additional features I might be able to add them.

Martin

[Martin Hepperle]

Dear all,

some days ago I received the remaining 5 books (HP-41 related and HP-71 Basic Made Easy translation) from Heldermann Verlag and I hope to make them available early next year. This time the plan is top cut the spine of the books away (even if it breaks a collectors heart) and run the individual pages through the scanner to accelerate the process and produce better results. Stay tuned...

Martin
[EDIT]Two more books have been added as of December 5.[/EDIT]
[EDIT]Four more books have been added as of December 15. Thus all nine books about Hewlett Packard calculators/computers published by the Heldermann Verlag are now available in digital form for your personal usage.[/EDIT]
Check out http://www.mh-aerotools.de/hp.
Placing copies of these files on the HP Computer Museum web site (and the DVD set) is of course also allowed (maintaing the copyright notices in the documents).

[Martin Hepperle]

(11-12-2014 08:35 PM)aurelio Wrote:  Did you try to read with a wand any of the barcodes printed from your scan?
I printed five random pages and I found that a few works but not all...checksum problem...... the quality of the scan is the same.....i printed with a laser b/w printer...is there any trick?

Aurelio,

this is interesting.

Unfortunately I don't have a HP-41 with wand. That was the reason why I wanted to develop my own solution.

I tested the barcode printed from my program as follows:
- printed to a PDF file (Acrobat PDF Writer)
- exported via Acrobat to a PNG image
- re-read the PNG images with my program (no checksum errors)
- I read the resulting .p41 program file into the V41 emulator.

I think that my checksum code in the reader portion is correct as it works nicely for all barcodes I copied from books, PPC, other barcode printers etc.
As I can read back my own barcodes I think that the checksum algorithm would also be o.k.
Concerning the bar dimensions I followed very closely the HP documentation so this should be o.k. too.

But: after reading your comments I crosschecked my code and I found an error in the calculation of the number of bytes for commands broken at the end of a barcode row and continued on the next row.
I have now (27 Nov) updated the .zip archive accordingly with a fixed version. Maybe you can give this another try?

Questions:
- do you have the possibility to print to a PNG file or produce a PNG file via Postscript and Ghostscript/Ghostview? Then you could re-read the barcodes with my program to check whether this works for you as in my case.
- can you send my your problem program in RAW, DAT or HEX format and tell me which rows pose a problem when reading back? I could then compare the barcode images with bar copdes produced by other programs.

Martin