Collaborate Disseminate
Smartphones have replaced a desktop calculator for most folks these days, but sometimes that tactility is just what you need to get the mathematical juices flowing. Why not spruce up …read more Continue reading Mechanical Switch Sci-Calc is Also a Macropad
While Texas Instruments maintains dominance in the calculator market (especially graphing calculators), there was a time when this wasn’t the case. HP famously built the first portable scientific calculator, the …read more Continue reading Reverse Time Back to the Days of RPN
How many of us have an everyday tool that’s truly unique? Likely not many of us; take a look around your desk and turn out your pockets, but more often …read more Continue reading Walnut Case Sets This Custom Arduino-Powered RPN Calculator Apart from the Crowd
Why reach for a bland, commercially available calculator when you be using a model that employs RPN (Reverse Polish Notation) in its calculations and be a custom build all at …read more Continue reading An Open-source Scientific RPN Calculator
Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys look at all that’s happening in hackerdom. This week we dive deep into super-accurate clock chips, SPI and microcontroller trickery, a new (and cheap) part on the microcontroller block, touch-sensitive cloth, and taking a home X-ray to the third dimension. We’re saying our goodbyes to …read more
Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys look at all that’s happening in hackerdom. This week we dive deep into super-accurate clock chips, SPI and microcontroller trickery, a new (and cheap) part on the microcontroller block, touch-sensitive cloth, and taking a home X-ray to the third dimension. We’re saying our goodbyes to …read more
Real quick question: how do you increase productivity at work? The greatest (highest paid) minds would just say: do agile or scrum or something. What’s scrum? That’s where you gather ’round every morning for a waste of time meeting that kills your every desire to be productive. A while back, [Travis Goodspeed] was stuck in some lesser circle of hell like this and in an effort to be polite by not looking at his phone too much, looked at his watch too much. This led to the creation of the Goodwatch, a new bit of hardware that replaces the guts …read more
Continue reading Shmoocon: Advanced Low Power Techniques And A Watch
What does a hacker do when he or she wants something but can’t afford it? They hack one together, of course. Or, in the case of [Ramón Calvo], they thoughtfully plan and prototype. [Ramón Calvo] wanted a scientific calculator, but couldn’t afford one, so he designed and built one himself.
[Ramón] started off with Arduino but upgraded initially to Freescale’s Freedom KL25Z development board upgraded to an ARM Cortex-M0+ programmed using mbed. The display is an Electronic Assembly DOGL-128 128×64 pixel LCD. [Ramón] did a couple of iterations on the PCB, going from a large DIY one in order for …read more
Continue reading Hackaday Prize Entry: DIY ARM Scientific Calculator
For [Robert]’s entry into The Hackaday Prize, he’s starting off with some basic questions. What’s better than a Nixie tube? More Nixies. What’s better than a calculator? An RPN calculator. What do you get when you combine the two? A calculator that is absurdly large, even by 1970s desk calculator standards, uses a lot of power, and takes up too much space. Sounds good to us.
Nixies, at least when there are a lot of them, are tricky devices. They only draw about 50mA of current, but they only light up when above 150V. That’s only about seven watts, and …read more
Continue reading Hackaday Prize Entry: A Programmable Calculator With Nixie Tubes