Complex Lock mode for WP-34s

[Jaco@cocoon-creations.com]

Hack: WP34C Entry RPN.

Firstly, thank you Nigel for reshaping the WP34S to an electrical engineering tool. And thank you Pauli, Walter and Marcus (and the other contributors) for making the 34S. It is small, powerful, and does the complex stuff well. My hacks below in no way attempt to even touch your amazing labour of love. I can't emphasize this enough and Nigel's instructions to get the branch to compile worked first time for me.

I discovered the WP34C branch recently and I love it. I like Entry RPN (from 28C years ago in grad school) and I dislike the automatic stack DUP upon entering of classic RPN. I do use classic RPN on the 35S, 42S, 32Sii and DM42, but my preference is without the DUP. I realise this is religious war arena, and I have no interest to argue to convince anyone otherwise. This simply is my choice for my own calculators and I'm sharing maybe for another engineer of my generation who may like it.

I decided to simply dive in and change the source code to roll my own "WP34C Entry RPN" model for my comfort. I don't particularly like the hidden menus of the 28C and I don't particularly care for the rest of its RPL, but I do like its Entry RPN. To me the WP34C provides me an opportunity to do it myself, so I hacked the code the way I like it.

Firstly, I am no programmer, and I am the kind of engineer that hacks stuff without proper understanding, and this is no exception. If there is interest out there to do this job properly, please do so, and fix the hacks. At this point the hack seems to work for me, but I am still testing, and the jury is still out.

Furthermore, the choices of the key label wording for my new tool did not appeal to me, and neither did the text below the keys, so I decided to roll my own vinyl stickers as well. I used Eric's old blue slant template from this forum as starting point (which I confirmed he does not sell anymore), and re-did all labels from scratch using my fonts, spacing, weights, characters, etc. in a way that pleases my eyes. Again, this is a mod for my calculators, and not an intention to start religious wars.

I intend to print a batch of vinyl stickers for the couple of new HP30S units that I bought, so if there is any interest, I would consider posting label sheets, and I would also consider input on improving my key texts. (Discussion point: I am wondering if it is worth trying to put the Greek characters in the grey boxes above the alphabetic characters, but I haven't thought that through yet).

To test my stickers and code hacks, I stuck my key label layout on a new WP34C Entry RPN Windows emulator, to try it out.

Current label text version: Sticker Layout CPJX-ii:

1. Version CPJX-i: I have printed the first round of stickers and stuck them on a real calculator, but there were several lessons learnt in the fonts and the sizing.

2. Version CPJX-ii is on the current emulator referred to here, for comment.

3. I will print version CPJX-iii next week and first try it onto the real calculator. It will likely need mods.

4. Version -iv will likely go onto my batch of calculators.

5. See http://www.cocoon-creations.com/download...medium.bmp for my layout text, png version attached.

6. See http://www.cocoon-creations.com/download..._ii_jm.zip for the Windows WP34C Entry RPN emulator, with a text file describing the hacks to the SVN source.

7. I plan to do a batch of labels towards the end of Feb 2019, depending progress.

8. If I need to increase quantities for anybody interested, do let me know.

9. If there are improvements to be made to the stickers, do let me know.

10. If I made a catastrophic error which will break something in the otherwise great WP34C, please let me know ;-)


Jaco