This setup uses Direct Cab Control (DCC), a system that modulates commands for locomotives while still providing 12-15V to the tracks. There’s a lot more to controlling model trains these days than simply connecting a big ‘ol variac to the tracks. It’s an N-gauge model train, with complete control over the locomotive. If you can send serial data to a shift register from a graphing calculator, that means you can send serial data to anything, bringing us to Cemetech’s next great build featured this year. Of course, the PCB for the LED cube is designed as an Arduino shield for ease of prototyping, but make no mistake: this is an LED cube controlled by a calculator. The electronics are simple, and just a few 595s and transistors, but this LED cube is taking serial data directly from the link cable on a graphing calculator. The most impressive, at least from a soldering standpoint, is their LED cube controlled by a graphing calculator. They’re the main driving force behind turning these pocket computers with truly terrible displays into usable computing platforms.Īs you would expect from any booth, Cemetech brought out the goods demonstrating exactly what a graphing calculator can do. These things have been around in one form or another for almost three decades, and for a lot of budding hackers out there, this was the first computer they owned and had complete access to.Īs hacking graphing calculators is a favorite for Maker Faires, we were pleased to see Cemetech make it out to this year’s World Maker Faire in New York last weekend. The most important computing platform for teaching kids programming is the Texas Instruments graphing calculator. It’s not Apple IIs, and it’s not Raspberry Pis. Posted in classic hacks Tagged calculator, Circuit Python, graphics calculator, graphing calculator, python, texas instruments, ti, ti-83 When you’ve done it, chuck us a link on the tip line. We’re fully expecting to see Twitter clients and multiplayer games hit the TI-83 platform before long, of course. This is a hack in its early days, so it’s currently more about building a platform at this stage rather then building fully-fledged projects just yet. It’s a tricky business, involving USB IDs and some other hacks, but it’s nothing that can’t be achieved in a few hours or so. For those of you that aren’t in Atmel’s sales team, that means it’s possible to use things like the Adafruit Trinket M0 and the Arduino Zero instead, when flashed with the appropriate CircuitPython firmware. With some hacking, the TI-Python can instead be replaced with other boards based on Atmel SAMD21 chips. This discovery led to further digging, of course. The chip inside is an Atmel SAMD21E18A-U, and is apparently running Adafruit’s CircuitPython platform. This allows users to program in Python, with the TI-Python doing the work and the calculator essentially acting as a thin client. This led to the development of the TI-Python peripheral, which plugs into the calculator’s expansion port. Rumor has it that TI have been unable to get Python to run viably directly on the TI-83 Premium CE. The market is starting to hot up, though – and TI have recently been doing some interesting work with Python on their TI-83. They remain viable almost solely due to their use in education and the fact that their limited connectivity makes them suitable for use in exams. They’re relatively underpowered, and usually come with cheap, low resolution screens to boot. Graphing calculators are an interesting niche market these days.
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