Re: OpenRPN Message #8 Posted by Bill Wiese on 28 May 2007, 2:54 a.m., in response to message #7 by Paul Dale
Another 48/49 clone with RPL and non-4-level stack will not be warmly received. At least going back and doing Woodstock or Pioneers will address a replacement market for the fervently loyal.
Why buy such a 48/49-like product when there's new & used ones available? Who (other than starving students) really uses a CAS system when they have PC software available? It's overkill.
This "project" has grown into creeping featurism - heavyduty ARM CPU, etc.
If someone gave me a 48/49 calc, I might use it for a wheel chock for my truck. I've given away two 48s - they're useless too me: too much in too small of a box.
Many others here probably feel the same - 48/49 is overkill, if we need that much functionality we can go use Matlab, Maple, etc. on a PC.
A nicely-done 41CX/42S/15C (or some combination thereof) - with XYZT+L stack and a large Enter key - is the functionality that I think many or most here want. An alternate idea might be to support 71B BASIC programmability with a regular RPN calc 'front end' for direct-mode use.
In any case, it appears everyone is worried about which CPU or which LCD, etc. All these are relatively trivial decisions, and which are academically fun to make but which are kinda useless since any HP calc can be emulated on any reasonable 8-bit microcontroller these days.
Y'all are thinking like EEs, where all problems are electronic-related - which they often aren't. Packaging is key, and no one has addressed this for any manufacturability.
It will cost about the same to get a 40 key calc produced whether or not it has a fancy CPU.
The real issue in making this come to fruition is packaging and
keytop issues. These require a chunk of money for NRE, and since no one rationally will drop $50K min to get this started, choice of CPU is irrelevant as it's all an academic exercise.
Bill Wiese
San Jose CA
|