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Can anyone suggest a viable alternative for the TI graphing calculator? A mobile app would be great, but the ones I tried from the app store were pretty awful.

by exDM69 11y ago

Can anyone suggest a viable alternative for the TI graphing calculator? A mobile app would be great, but the ones I tried from the app store were pretty awful. So far the best affordable alternative I've tried is... a TI calculator emulator. Which requires a ROM dumped from a TI calculator. I quickly tried out the Desmos webapp suggested in the article, but it's rather basic and while it might work for a high school student, it's not a serious tool for scientific and engineering work that the TI can be. It does pretty plots but that's about it (I generally use gnuplot for that, and it has more useful tools than Desmos has, albeit a bit difficult to use and discover). Back in my high school days, I was pretty bad ass with the TI-85 graphing calculator, to the point that I felt like cheating because I could easily use it to solve and verify most exercises and exams. I could have learned a whole lot more maths had I not had such a powerful calculator. And it wasn't even one of the fancy symbolic calculators that high school kids these days have. The last time I put my TI through its paces was in university orbital mechanics class where I used it to do initial orbit determination of an asteroid based on three observations. That wouldn't have been possible without a powerful calculator, with variables in memory and such. These days my calculator has fallen into disuse because I need it so irregularly that I don't have a good reason to carry it around. But it would be great to have something as powerful in my pocket at all times.

russdill 11y ago
hp-48gx emulator?
- kayfox 11y ago
  Or just an HP-48GX
- tonyarkles 11y ago
  Funny enough, that's what you get when you purchase an HP-49 (not even sure if it's still available, but it's what I bought for engineering school 13 years ago). The story goes that HP couldn't get a faster version of the (12MHz Saturn?) CPU in the '48, but wanted to release a faster version. Since they couldn't get a faster compatible CPU but wanted to continue using their battle-hardened codebase, they decided to replace the CPU with a 200MHz ARM and write an emulator. I suppose that's maybe easier than trying to port a heavily optimized codebase to a new architecture. Plus, moving forward, you could write C code and compile it directly for ARM. If I'm remembering right, I did manage to get a C "hello world" building with gcc before losing interest.
  - makomk 11y ago
    Wikipedia reckons that the fab they were using could no longer make the Saturn CPU, and I guess it was a lot cheaper to write an emulator at that point than to redesign it for a more modern process node.
    - tonyarkles 11y ago
      Awesome! It was quite a while ago, glad I got most of the details right!
jkot 11y ago
Excel or other Spreadsheet.
- exDM69 11y ago
  Not at all what I'm looking for. There's no nice mobile spreadsheet software and if I have a laptop with me, I'd much rather use something like Mathematica or Maxima or Octave or Python+SciPy or Gnuplot depending on the task at hand. Excel doesn't do symbolic computation and it's rather clumsy for dealing with mathematical expressions rather than arrays of numbers. Although I must admit that I'm not very good with Excel, perhaps it would be useful to spend some time with it (or the LibreOffice equivalent). For some basic tasks, I can get along with Wolfram Alpha mobile app (it does plots and symbolic integration/differentiation), but it's not very good for long calculations where I need to store results from previous calculations.
  - murkle 11y ago
    Try GeoGebra (it also has a full CAS View if you need exact calculations)
throwaway7767 11y ago
> Can anyone suggest a viable alternative for the TI graphing calculator? It's not cheaper, but while taking some nightschool math classes a couple of years ago I bought an HP Prime[0], which was new on the market then. It's a truly excellent calculator which puts the TIs to shame. It's a calculator with a modern multitouch interface so you can use pinch-to-zoom on graphs, etc. It uses the xCas engine[1] as a backend and has a spiffy calculator frontend, so you can write formulas as they would appear in a textbook. EDIT: It also has an ARM processor, IIRC around 300MHz. It really shows when graphing complex equations, where the TIs take forever. I hear the newest TI nSpire ones have a slightly more modern CPU, but I really hate the interface there (it's no longer really a calculator for me, but a shitty tablet). If you want an actual physical calculator, I strongly recommend this one. [0] http://h41336.www4.hp.com/hpprime http://h41336.www4.hp.com/hpprime [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xcas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xcas
- exDM69 11y ago
  I don't want another physical calculator but thanks for pointing me to Xcas. I haven't heard of it before, I must give it a go. I've been using Mathematica for most of my computer algebra tasks, but it's not free. I've dabbled with Maxima and SymPy but neither are as easy to use or as powerful as Mathematica.
xlm1717 11y ago
I think what is needed is something that works for high school students. If you need to do serious scientific and engineering work, programs like Matlab and gnuplot, which you mentioned, work, and even learning Python will probably give better results than an old graphing calculator that isn't high-precision. As was suggested in the article, a cheap Chromebook is very well capable of running Python, and cheap linux laptops could run Matlab.
cartoonfoxes 11y ago
> Can anyone suggest a viable alternative for the TI graphing calculator? An HP graphing calculator.

by exDM69 11y ago

russdill 11y ago

hp-48gx emulator?

kayfox 11y ago
Or just an HP-48GX
tonyarkles 11y ago
Funny enough, that's what you get when you purchase an HP-49 (not even sure if it's still available, but it's what I bought for engineering school 13 years ago). The story goes that HP couldn't get a faster version of the (12MHz Saturn?) CPU in the '48, but wanted to release a faster version. Since they couldn't get a faster compatible CPU but wanted to continue using their battle-hardened codebase, they decided to replace the CPU with a 200MHz ARM and write an emulator. I suppose that's maybe easier than trying to port a heavily optimized codebase to a new architecture. Plus, moving forward, you could write C code and compile it directly for ARM. If I'm remembering right, I did manage to get a C "hello world" building with gcc before losing interest.
- makomk 11y ago
  Wikipedia reckons that the fab they were using could no longer make the Saturn CPU, and I guess it was a lot cheaper to write an emulator at that point than to redesign it for a more modern process node.
  - tonyarkles 11y ago
    Awesome! It was quite a while ago, glad I got most of the details right!

jkot 11y ago

Excel or other Spreadsheet.

exDM69 11y ago
Not at all what I'm looking for. There's no nice mobile spreadsheet software and if I have a laptop with me, I'd much rather use something like Mathematica or Maxima or Octave or Python+SciPy or Gnuplot depending on the task at hand. Excel doesn't do symbolic computation and it's rather clumsy for dealing with mathematical expressions rather than arrays of numbers. Although I must admit that I'm not very good with Excel, perhaps it would be useful to spend some time with it (or the LibreOffice equivalent). For some basic tasks, I can get along with Wolfram Alpha mobile app (it does plots and symbolic integration/differentiation), but it's not very good for long calculations where I need to store results from previous calculations.
- murkle 11y ago
  Try GeoGebra (it also has a full CAS View if you need exact calculations)

throwaway7767 11y ago

> Can anyone suggest a viable alternative for the TI graphing calculator? It's not cheaper, but while taking some nightschool math classes a couple of years ago I bought an HP Prime[0], which was new on the market then. It's a truly excellent calculator which puts the TIs to shame. It's a calculator with a modern multitouch interface so you can use pinch-to-zoom on graphs, etc. It uses the xCas engine[1] as a backend and has a spiffy calculator frontend, so you can write formulas as they would appear in a textbook. EDIT: It also has an ARM processor, IIRC around 300MHz. It really shows when graphing complex equations, where the TIs take forever. I hear the newest TI nSpire ones have a slightly more modern CPU, but I really hate the interface there (it's no longer really a calculator for me, but a shitty tablet). If you want an actual physical calculator, I strongly recommend this one. [0] http://h41336.www4.hp.com/hpprime http://h41336.www4.hp.com/hpprime [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xcas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xcas

exDM69 11y ago
I don't want another physical calculator but thanks for pointing me to Xcas. I haven't heard of it before, I must give it a go. I've been using Mathematica for most of my computer algebra tasks, but it's not free. I've dabbled with Maxima and SymPy but neither are as easy to use or as powerful as Mathematica.

xlm1717 11y ago

I think what is needed is something that works for high school students. If you need to do serious scientific and engineering work, programs like Matlab and gnuplot, which you mentioned, work, and even learning Python will probably give better results than an old graphing calculator that isn't high-precision. As was suggested in the article, a cheap Chromebook is very well capable of running Python, and cheap linux laptops could run Matlab.

cartoonfoxes 11y ago

> Can anyone suggest a viable alternative for the TI graphing calculator? An HP graphing calculator.