[HN Gopher] TI-83 Plus One More
___________________________________________________________________
TI-83 Plus One More
Author : rez10191
Score : 123 points
Date : 2022-07-31 13:20 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.leadedsolder.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.leadedsolder.com)
| iasay wrote:
| I have done many a repair with kynar wire like this. I am not
| proud of most of them but they worked afterwards.
| libertine wrote:
| I always wondered what are the margins for this product, it's the
| same product for decades, and the price tag remains high.
|
| The cool thing is that it can be passed on younger generations.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/768/
| Aissen wrote:
| > Over the course of several decades, they must have been making
| a large integer multiple of the build cost in pure margin while
| not updating the product.
|
| Yup, this is an open secret about calculators: they are basically
| regulatory capture nowadays, since you can buy much more powerful
| devices for cheaper. Software used to be an advantage, but the
| algorithms they use are now common knowledge.
|
| You can also use an alternative like NumWorks, that has source-
| available software and lets you run your own code; they have
| played the regulation game and have a reset button that allows
| them to be used at some exams in France, Italy, Netherlands, some
| US states, etc.
| gamerDude wrote:
| Most of the schools I work with now have their students use
| Desmos, a free online graphing calculator. So thankfully, we've
| been moving away from TI.
| sascha_sl wrote:
| In some states of Germany they also lobbied for advanced high
| school courses to require a Voyage 200 (after you already
| shelled out for a TI-84+). This thing was pricy and the school
| ended up having a few units to lend out because not everyone
| could afford them.
| int_19h wrote:
| There's one thing that calculators can do that powerful modern
| gadgets cannot: run on AAA batteries.
|
| It doesn't even have to be something as old as TI-83, too. For
| example, Casio Prizm FX-50 has a color screen, and can be
| mounted over USB as a storage device. And in terms of hardware
| power, it's fast enough to run a NES emulator:
| https://github.com/tswilliamson/nesizm.
|
| (For the curious, here's a dev wiki for this platform: https://
| prizm.cemetech.net/index.php/Prizm_Programming_Porta...)
| modeless wrote:
| It is a shame that calculators are stuck in the past for silly
| regulatory reasons, but there is a silver lining. These relics
| are excellent machines for learning low level programming
| without the complexity of modern hardware. You can write C code
| with essentially no operating system underneath you, read the
| keyboard I/O registers directly, flip pixels on the screen by
| writing to the framebuffer pointer, write your own interrupt
| handlers, etc. There are no other widely available computers
| this simple anymore, and because of their ubiquity there is
| still an active hobbyist community making new software.
|
| If I was going to make a course on programming I would get
| every student a calculator and have them write some C on it.
| Nav_Panel wrote:
| Yeah, absolutely. I learned to code in middle school in TI
| Basic during math class (much to my math teacher's dismay),
| writing little platformer games as a snarl of GOTOs and pixel
| on-off (because the more robust drawing functions weren't
| fast enough to do real-time gameplay/animation). Impossible
| code to read, but I had a lot of fun.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| > there is a silver lining. These relics are excellent
| machines for learning low level programming without the
| complexity of modern hardware.
|
| My thought exactly. Give kids a calculator app for their
| phone, and I'm positive far fewer would end up writing code
| for it - and fewer would end up as developers.
|
| There's something _so cool_ about writing a little game and
| showing it to your friends when you 're in 9th grade. "Dude,
| you programmed a game on your calculator?! You're a genius"
| is so fun to hear at 14 years old.
| zerocrates wrote:
| Do you have any knowledge whether there's still much of
| this going on?
|
| I remember futzing around with TI Basic and
| downloading/sharing more complex games from others... but
| we didn't have smartphones then. I just wonder to what
| extent students still care about that stuff today.
|
| I suppose there's still some appeal from the "look like
| you're doing work" factor if nothing else.
| morninglight wrote:
| The Raspberry Pi Pico has opened the door to young
| experimenters thanks to the MMBasic programming language
| from Geoff Graham. There are several excellent videos
| that explain the setup and operation. The Pico is
| actually available for $4. The software and manual (PDF)
| are free to download. It is super easy to get started - 5
| minutes and you're writing software that can solve
| problems and control I/O.
|
| PicoMite: Running BASIC on a Raspberry Pi Pico
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxmjy1nz6MM
|
| PicoMiteVGA Raspberry Pi Pico Running BASIC on VGA
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIK1ujslHHI
|
| ....
| pfyra wrote:
| Yes yes, but the pico is a lot harder to program during
| class while looking like you are doing school work.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| It's funny reading this thread where everyone is leaning
| towards "those dang kids and their smartphones are
| missing out" while ignoring things like Roblox, where
| entire economies are being built of the creativity of
| kids
| morelisp wrote:
| I don't want economies, I want kids to have genuine,
| self-directed creative outlets. _At best_ today Roblox is
| baby's first hustle culture.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| Looking on Amazon... TI calculators are running Python
| nowadays. Much easier to understand but C would be a much
| better introduction to computing for them :(
| modeless wrote:
| TI has never supported C on its calculators. That's part
| of the fun :)
| saagarjha wrote:
| Writing C for the TI-83+ is generally not a very pleasant
| experience. Now, for the m68k TI-89, that's a different
| story.
| ska wrote:
| Could be worse, the contemporaneous up-market option was
| still HP at the TI-83 time, no? In that case if I recall
| correctly your only options were reverse polish lisp and
| assembly...
| christkv wrote:
| I plan to check out https://www.aoz.studio/ its by the guy
| who wrote the legendary AMOS games programming software for
| the Amiga and looks a fun way to teach programming
| undersuit wrote:
| I learned how to program basic on my 83 over a weekend
| between my track and field events. Made the calculator much
| more usable.
| omginternets wrote:
| Damn, that would be incredible. Any chance you'd consider
| making a YouTube series?
| ruph123 wrote:
| The NumWorks calculator looks very interesting. Too bad it does
| not have a RPN mode.
|
| Otherwise the SwissMicros calculators can be recommended. They
| are all RPN and are modeled after iconic HP calcs. They are
| just very pricey, especially for non-graphing calcs.
| ranger207 wrote:
| The Omega alternate firmware does have RPN
|
| https://getomega.dev/
| LEARAX wrote:
| My DM42 broke in under 2 weeks and Swissmicros support was
| completely unreachable. I would strongly recommend getting a
| used older HP calculator instead.
| ericvsmith wrote:
| I had the exact opposite experience. After already owning a
| DM42, DM41X, and a DM16L, and I bought a DM12L for a
| client. The screen had several LCD segments that faintly
| showed as always on. I wrote an email and was contacted by
| Michael (the founder) almost immediately. He said they'd
| happily take it back and send me a new one, but it would
| take a few weeks for shipping from Europe. Instead he
| suggested that I first try putting it in the oven at 70C
| (160F for us 'Mericans) for a few hours. So I disassembled
| it and put just the PCB/display unit in the oven. And sure
| enough: problem solved!
|
| tl;dr: I thought their service was great.
|
| Although I do love my real HP's, too. I own maybe a dozen.
| I think the 32sII is my favorite, but I dearly miss my 41CV
| from back in the day. Maybe I should find a used one of
| those.
|
| On the programming side: I definitely agree with those
| saying calculators were/are an entry to programming. My
| first programs were on an HP-29c. I thought I had invented
| binary search!
| projektfu wrote:
| I had the privilege of buying two expensive calculators. First,
| a TI-85 (1993) and then a new math teacher hired was more
| familiar with the HP-48G (1995) and had us get one. While fun
| to use to goof off in class, I felt they were like learning to
| use a slide rule: obsolete before you bought them. Did the
| small screen and the over-precise numeric answers give us a
| better idea of what we were doing than pencil and graph paper?
| Did it make any students appreciate math subjects more?
|
| Having built an RPN evaluator at summer camp, I appreciated
| that my friends were learning it, too, on the HP-48.
|
| In college, I literally never used it. A simple scientific
| calculator was almost always more useful.
| petee wrote:
| I'd argue that a sliderule is at least something you can
| manipulate with your hands and immediately see the output
| relationship.
|
| Tangent, I use a tape measure at work and you can fold it
| back on itself to make a basic slide rule for quick addition
| and subtraction without bothering with fractions :)
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Mine was a hand me down from my older sister. Our public school
| did have some TI-82s that they lent out for classes, but that
| wasn't always the case and the cost of a calculator was
| certainly a burden on some families.
| siraben wrote:
| I've owned a TI-84+ calculator since around middle school (they
| are priced ridiculously everywhere on the planet, and this only
| exacerbates the problem because of purchasing power differences).
| However, it can provide a unique programming environment that
| rivals modern setups with a lot of learning potential (perhaps I
| would recommend NumWorks these days, but it's still $100.)
|
| One of the earliest programs I wrote in middle school was a
| program to solve quadratic equations given the coefficients, then
| a program to compute the golden ratio by iterating the function
| f(x) = 1+1/x, and a Langston's ant program (all written in TI-
| BASIC on the device itself, with zero setup necessary.)
|
| Later on in high school (late 2010s) as I learned C programming
| and data structures on my own, I read "Learn TI-83 Plus Assembly
| In 28 Days"[0] and got into assembly programming, eventually
| culminating in a Forth-based operating system[1] that runs from
| boot. You do need to have a computer for this setup, but the
| calculator comes with a cable in the box. It also was not
| uncommon to see other high school students download games or do
| light forms of hacking (mostly centered around storing data to be
| retrieved during exams.)
|
| Contrast this to if you wanted to do assembly programming on a
| modern computer and understand the boot processes of your
| machine. It's significantly more complicated that even at the
| university level it is not taught in detail. The boot process[2]
| or memory mapping[3] for the 84+ can be understood relatively
| easily, and the assembly instructions are much simpler.
|
| While I similarly lament the price point, the fact that you have
| essentially given/required the purchase of a standardized, self-
| contained, non-trivial computer to students could potentially be
| used to teach programming and computer science from an early age.
|
| [0] https://tutorials.eeems.ca/ASMin28Days/lesson/toc.html
|
| [1] https://github.com/siraben/zkeme80
|
| [2]
| https://wikiti.brandonw.net/index.php?title=83Plus:State_of_...
|
| [3]
| https://wikiti.brandonw.net/index.php?title=83Plus:Memory_Ma...
| glitchc wrote:
| I did the same fix for my mother-in-law's calculator. She teaches
| high school kids and this is her mainstay. Of course one day it
| got the dreaded disappearing rows (where two or more rows go
| dead), and this was the fix someone recommended on the forums.
|
| Now my own 83 is in the same state. Although I have a Ti-89
| kicking around, I still miss the ergonomics of the 83.
|
| All in all, wanted to say thanks for the writeup.
| rwmj wrote:
| The vias are there in order to connect different "islands" of the
| ground plane together I think. (Not literal disconnected islands,
| but you generally want ground planes on different layers to be
| connected as much as possible).
| marwatk wrote:
| Tangentially related, I just finished porting wxWabbitemu (TI
| calculator emulator) to WASM last week [1]. I recently switched
| to iOS from Android and sorely missed the TI emulator app. I use
| my TI-85 from high school as my desk calculator and the primary
| calculator on my phone.
|
| The UI is meant for cell phones, I don't have a max-width set so
| it looks funky on a full desktop browser.
|
| [1] https://marwatk.github.io/wasmwabbitemu/
| jamesliudotcc wrote:
| My high school basically expected you to get a TI 83. My dad
| decided that it was a ripoff and we got Casios instead. Casios?
| Oh, nothing survived in my backpack. Nothing, so Casios.
|
| Eventually my school got around to issuing me and my acadec
| teammates TI-89s.
|
| Looking back, I still think the most useful aspect was being able
| to see what calculation you typed in, so you could check for
| typos.
| erhsfhgvz wrote:
| similar situation, but in my case the school wanted everyone to
| have a TI-82. when we went to walmart, they were out of 82s, so
| my folks splurged and bought me an 85 without knowing the
| incompatibilities.
|
| not being able to link with peers and teachers sucked, but that
| calculator gave me my first taste of hardware -- building a pc
| link cable by cramming two diodes and half a link cable into my
| pc parallel port, and first taste of z80 assembly
| dbecks wrote:
| My first platform for programming! Simple Menus, Goto statements,
| images. I loved making games on this thing.
|
| And yes, it was highway robbery at $90+
| Shared404 wrote:
| Same here!
|
| I remember hacking a loop into TI-Basic by having programs call
| into each other, since there was no looping control flow built
| in.
|
| Never did write anything more advanced than TI-basic, I'd heard
| horror stories of people bricking calculators, and mine was an
| emotionally sensitive hand-me-down.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| TI-BASIC definitely had loops, though maybe not on the
| version you had? I had the TI-85/86 (which were mostly
| identical, the 85 was stolen by a student in the tutoring lab
| I volunteered in in high school). Looking up TI-83 manuals,
| they had for and while loops.
| Shared404 wrote:
| I was on a TI-83, not a plus, and couldn't find them at
| all.
|
| Always possible I was just an idiot. I remember having
| looked it up, but I was also a dumb high schooler at the
| time.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| What at least the 85/86 series didn't permit (86 was
| almost identical to the 85) was direct recursion, which
| woulds fail immediately. I don't think I ever tried
| indirect recursion, which also would have failed. If I
| understand correctly, the problem was that there was no
| call stack (in the way every mainstream language does
| things anymore). So the return address location for a
| program was singular, if you made multiple (recursive,
| direct or indirect) calls into a program where it would
| return to was whatever the _last_ call set the return
| address to. Like old school COBOL and FORTRAN where
| procedures were non-reentrant. Of course, I was in high
| school too and didn 't know about the inner workings of
| computers like that. So I figured out how to use the list
| data structure on the calculator as a stack to create my
| own "recursive" programs either trampolining (A calls B
| repeatedly in a loop until the list-as-stack is emptied,
| indicating termination) or with loops (skip the call to B
| and keep it all in one program).
|
| Limitations lead to creativity.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| Lol, unfortunately I think you just missed it. Software-
| wise, the TI-83 was nearly identical to the plus. I
| actually had a later revision of TI-83 that had an
| identical housing to the plus, but with differently
| tinted buttons.
| Izkata wrote:
| I had a TI-83+, not a TI-83, so I can't be sure but I
| suspect you're misremembering which feature was missing:
| The + did have while loops but didn't have functions, but
| calling another program worked like a function call with
| no parameters and no return value (and you could fake
| both by using the global variables).
| krallja wrote:
| `Ans` stored the value of the last expression, so you
| could use that as a "return value" of sorts.
| paulcole wrote:
| I wrote a fair amount of assembly for my TI-83 and some
| assembly and C for my TI-89. I don't remember it being
| possible to accidentally brick the calculators because if you
| messed up enough and froze everything, you just took the
| batteries out, opened up the case and popped out the little
| hearing-aid battery which reset everything.
| Shared404 wrote:
| I'm sure that would work - over the years since I learned
| much more about computers, and realized I needn't have
| worried so much.
|
| My misconception came from an article I read at some point
| which described assembly/C (I think) programming as more
| risky, and I just took it at face value.
| paulcole wrote:
| It was definitely annoying and if you didn't have a
| screwdriver to get inside it was "bricked."
|
| The one thing I was never brave enough to do was
| overclock. Supposedly it was just unsoldering a capacitor
| which would do something like 3x the clock speed.
| jcalabro wrote:
| Me too!
|
| I used it to enter my school's science fair where I wrote a
| program that was a couple thousand lines to calculate, chart,
| and explore the relationship between musical notes and
| frequencies. I didn't have a thesis or anything, just did a
| bunch of programming, and the judges did not care for it haha.
| At the time, I didn't even realize it was "programming" a
| computer, it was just fun!
|
| Once I started to learn to program for real, I thought it was
| weird that I had to type all the characters myself rather than
| selecting from a list of pre-defined functions!
| Glawen wrote:
| Thanks for the post, I have a ti82 with LCD screen issue, I will
| try this technique!
| dm319 wrote:
| As an adult I've discovered the joys of RPN for calculators. I
| use free42/plus42 on my phone which is an opensource simulator of
| the HP42. My kids havent started using calculators yet, but I'm
| debating whether it's a good idea to teach them RPN. I think it's
| a better way of using calculators, but don't want them to get
| confused in class. Add to that there isn't a simple RPN
| calculator that I know of.
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| So many possibilities of a small key based computer.
| krallja wrote:
| CollapseOS has a "just to show it's possible" port to the
| TI-84+ -
| https://incoherency.co.uk/collapseos/hw/z80/ti84/index.html
| Stampo00 wrote:
| I don't know if the author will see this or not. The RF shielding
| probably didn't get wet. It just looks like that. I have a TI-83
| Plus Silver Edition which sports a semi-transparent case. I'm the
| original owner. I never got a drop of liquid on it. And the RF
| shield in mine looks exactly like yours. It has since the day I
| bought it.
| georgia_peach wrote:
| I remember when these started taking over. Last semester's
| calculus class became next semester's "calculator" class. Okay
| for a few budding programmers; an educational decline for
| everyone else. And I never understood the programming appeal.
| Circa 1996, a thrift-store commodore was still a cheaper & better
| programming experience.
|
| I was also fairly pissed about having to pay $100+ on a
| calculator which was wholly unnecessary for learning "area under
| the curve" and "slope at a point". College is such a shakedown.
| SnowHill9902 wrote:
| That's an uncanny valley between an HP-32S RPN calculator or a
| simple algebraic Casio and Octave/Matlab. I don't think TIs
| should be needed if exams are correctly prepared by professors.
| Good professors prepare conceptual and theoretical exams where
| you can solve most things algebraically or even leave the end
| result to be evaluated at a final step.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Asking a bunch of rich suburbanite kids to spend $150-180
| Canadian on a TI-84 Plus is one thing, but I'm not sure I could
| really sleep at night forcing a disadvantaged family to pay that
| much for a machine - multiple days of work at even a $15 minimum
| wage - that surely didn't cost more than $20 to construct.
|
| There's a point where you have to realize a company has a duty
| not only to its shareholders, but to the society it exists in.
| When you achieve a monopoly, you become responsible for a lot of
| collaterals you normally wouldn't consider.
| hinkley wrote:
| Microsoft stumbled when they forgot that, while they had a
| student discount for their products, the real reason so many
| young people came into the job market with Windows experience
| was piracy.
|
| When they went after businesses for piracy, people were mostly
| okay with that. When deep pockets are fined that does not lead
| to moral outrage. When they made it very difficult to pirate,
| they injured the hobbyist market.
|
| There is definitely a place in the world for low margin
| products aimed at fairness and advertising. And with hardware,
| ignoring piracy doesn't really work, so there are really only
| two options. Subsidized sales, or a very robust resale market.
| The latter requires explicit support for First Sale Doctrine,
| products designed for repair, and narrow enough gaps between
| new and old hardware that the newest stuff is attractive but
| not mandatory. Do some of those but not the other and you get
| accused of paying lip service but having no solution. And for
| the most part they are right.
|
| There are YouTube videos of people buying eight broken Nintendo
| handhelds and trying to salvage 5 working devices out of them.
| These are noteworthy because it's harder than it should be, and
| sometimes these people lose money on the project, only breaking
| even from the YouTube royalties. If social justice were a goal,
| you'd need to at least double that success rate, maybe more.
| whatshisface wrote:
| If someone is smart enough to turn eight broken Nintendo
| handhelds into five working ones their skills would probably
| be better put to something more useful.
| hinkley wrote:
| You can be good at more than one thing in your life. If all
| you do is program you've hamstrung yourself badly. Some
| people see it and course correct, others become old men,
| full of regret.
|
| I've known of two bike clubs that would refurbish old bikes
| for kids. Once you learn enough maintenance to trust your
| own repairs at speeds and distances most people avoid,
| doing repairs for others isn't much of a stretch. Fixing
| calculators or tablets or game boys wouldn't be a full time
| job. A lot of social projects are volunteer or nonprofit.
| morelisp wrote:
| Aside from a lack of empathy this just isn't true. TV
| repair shops aren't the great career they used to be; you
| can't make a living on basic soldering skills, a Radio
| Shack catalog, patience and elbow grease, and a good set of
| screwdrivers anymore.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Most of the programmers I know would not be able to do
| that, what I mean is that they should become programmers.
| crest wrote:
| To argue that a company's only duty is to its shareholders does
| open one up to the argument that nobody but the shareholders
| (and maybe the employees) owes any duty to companies (e.g.
| respecting their property). Why should anyone pay for their
| products or services in such a worldview? You have to be a
| special kind of stupid to feel more sympathy for big
| cooperations than disadvantaged pupils and their parents.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| I'm honestly surprised that groups like Pine64 haven't tried
| making an open source competitor.
|
| edit: just saw a few comments down that NumWorks is basically
| that?
|
| edit2: based on Phi and Omega[1][2] it looks like they no
| longer truly are (probably to comply with the regulation
| nonsense), but they still can be jailbroken.
|
| [0] https://www.numworks.com/
|
| [1] https://phi.getomega.dev/
|
| [2] https://getomega.dev/
| criddell wrote:
| The barrier to replacing TI isn't hardware. Casio has cheaper
| calculators and test makers generally have a pretty big
| selection of acceptable calulators[1]. The barrier is often
| teachers. They don't want to change from what they know
| already.
|
| 1: https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat/what-to-bring-
| do/calcu...
| cbanek wrote:
| I had one of these, and I remember getting all sorts of sticky
| soda in it. The buttons almost had a crunch to them. Still worked
| perfectly though! I wonder where it might be after all these
| years. That thing was a tank!
| swimfar wrote:
| A more descriptive title would be, "TI-83 LCD ribbon repair".
|
| I have my old TI-86 which seems to have the same problem so I'll
| have to try the same technique.
|
| The TI calculators were amazing environments for learning
| assembly. There are a bunch of good tutorials and the computer is
| relatively simple and you get direct access to the display.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| I replaced the failed ribbon cable with small wires on my
| ti-83+ probably 7 years ago now. It was pretty straight
| forward. I've used the calculator maybe once since then, but I
| keep it around for nostalgia.
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