7 ms·

Last year I bought I used TI for my daughter who needed it for school. I got her the oldest version, the one which takes AAA batteries and communicates with the

Last year I bought I used TI for my daughter who needed it for school. I got her the oldest version, the one which takes AAA batteries and communicates with the outside world through a serial link. A project like this brings to mind the possibility of stuffing a Raspberry Pi Zero in the battery compartment, hooking it up to the school WiFi, using a terminal app on the calculator to communicate with the Pi and in that way voiding the whole reason of using these ancient beasts in the first place. I won't do this of course - she's there to learn other things besides refining the art of cheating [1] - but it would be a tempting hack. An even more elaborate hack would be to replace the guts of the thing with a Zero running a TI emulator as well as some more useful stuff like ssh. The possibilities are endless... so endless in fact that I'm fairly certain this has been done already, somewhere. [1] which in my days at school consisted of writing the translated works of Homer on a 10x10cm piece of paper, a good way to a) learn to write incredibly small and b) get those words to stick inside your head long enough so you don't actually need to consult the cheat "sheet" during the test.

shakna 5y ago
The ESP-01 is smaller, cheaper, less battery heavy, and already speaks serial so it wouldn't be hard to integrate it, just for the WiFi... And at a quick look there's a bunch of TI<->Arduino stuff out there in the wild it should be easy.
- the_third_wave 5y ago
  There are many ways to flay this hog, this is more of a thought experiment than a recipe for a TI-CH337. The ultimate hack would be to use a more modern version (with "high-res" screen) and replace/amend the guts with something which emulates the calculator - wabbitemu seems to work just fine [1] - but can also function in other ways. Add some key combination to switch functions and you have a mean lean cheatin' machine. [1] http://wabbitemu.org/ http://wabbitemu.org/
db48x 5y ago
Reminds me of when I was in high school. I found a terminal emulator for my HP48G, built a serial cable to connect it to my 2400 baud modem. I was able to use it to check my email in physics class. Of course I was only able to do that once; the modem was three or four times the size of the calculator with lots of blinkenlights on it, and trailing a phone cable half way across the classroom isn’t very subtle.
tyingq 5y ago
Here someone figured out how to drive the LCD screen from one. https://ripitapart.com/2013/03/02/making-use-of-an-old-ti-83-plus-lcd-screen/ https://ripitapart.com/2013/03/02/making-use-of-an-old-ti-83...
jrmann100 5y ago
I found it a lot of fun to interface with the TI calculators directly using the wonderful ArTICL Arduino library[0]. You can cobble together a link cable to imitate another calculator and hook it up to your microcontroller of choice. I enjoyed making a QWERTY keyboard and news app over WiFi using the tiny ESP-01 (as, coincidentally, @shakna suggested in this thread). 0: https://github.com/KermMartian/ArTICL https://github.com/KermMartian/ArTICL
IIAOPSW 5y ago
There's enough hacks you can do on the 83/84 without hardware gutting tricks. Even in plain old TI Basic. You can easily automate most of a HS curriculum and make an unbeatable tic tac toe program, no internet needed. Its honestly the first coding experience I ever had.
DrSiemer 5y ago
One of my proudest cheats was cramming the keywords of an entire presentation in French on a tiny round piece of paper, stuck to the glass of my wrist watch, so I could literally cheat while the whole class and teacher were watching me. Somehow I actually got away with multiple glances, only receiving a single remark about "being a bit too focused on the duration of my presentation". My cousin, who has always did have good entrepreneurial instincts, actually managed to turn a decent profit selling highly detailed printouts of micro cheatsheets at school.
- tener 5y ago
  How is having the transcript of the presentation cheating and not just being prepared?
  - draugadrotten 5y ago
    It's because school is preparing students for life, where it would be outrageous to have written notes while presenting or speaking. What's next, someone else writing the words for you?
    - Paraesthetic 5y ago
      Whats next, paying someone in a poorer country to write your things for you while you 'work from home'
      - xnzakg 5y ago
        Yeeeah that's already being done for a a bunch of IT courses. Check out some of those "freelance work" sites, it's fairly obvious a bunch of those are someone's homework...
    - grishka 5y ago
      It's because school is preparing students for life, where they would never have any chance to look anything up, and could thus only use their own memory. And that "you won't always have a calculator with you" thing math teachers loved so much? Yeah that didn't age well.
punnerud 5y ago
And if IT use the Cisco management console, they get the location down to 3-7m diameter of every WiFi, Bluetooth, Microwave ++ that is using the same band as WiFi. I was earlier in a startup that made an indoor navigation map, where you could get the blue dot without installing anything, by using this Cisco feature: https://use.mazemap.com https://use.mazemap.com
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
  What is maze map showing me? What is this?
- javindo 5y ago
  Feels incredibly strange that anyone can publicly view all these office layouts, down to very specific room/corridor/stair layouts, occupancy status, of random private office and university buildings...
danmur 5y ago
My school let you have two calculators so you could have notes on one of them and use the other. I don't really understand why, I'd rather just have paper notes. Fun things to play with though, the HP38G's we had had a nifty infrared communication thing so you could trade stuff with other people.
herbst 5y ago
I cheatet so much with my TI. In every class we were allowed to use a calculator I would literally code everything relevant for the test into this small thingy. I still think I better memorized some of the things as my class mates. Also I loved how it doesn't really communicate except with a cable no one had. So nobody expected me to share my 'cheats'
- Spare_account 5y ago
  You accidentally prepared for the test while thinking that you were cheating.
  - herbst 5y ago
    I did both I guess. And because I could not share it, teachers never bothered.
    - Spare_account 5y ago
      This gives me food for thought. I have young children, all under 10. The challenge is learning how to inspire them; you found a crutch that made learning less of a chore: converting the syllabus into chunks of code. I can already see that the my two eldest will both need very different answers, but if I can figure out what theirs is, I can hopefully help them focus where my childhood mind would wander during study sessions.
      - herbst 5y ago
        You sound like a good parent. For me finding these small ways to cope with the boring reality of schooling really made the difference
lifeisstillgood 5y ago
"I cheated in the finals of my metaphysics exam. I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me" -- Woody Allen Just reminded me.
ornornor 5y ago
One of my university teachers allowed us a double sided letter sized piece of paper during the exam and we could put whatever we felt like on it. This was brilliant because 1. In real life, you don’t memorize random facts. That’s what reference books and the internet is for. 2. Making the cheat sheet actually forced us to understand the material so they we could sum it up and for it on the page. By the time we were done writing the sheet, we had memorized most of it anyway. Yet another demonstration how school is completely out of touch with the jobs they’re claiming to be preparing you for.
- pmorici 5y ago
  I had an Econ teacher that did something similar but it was a note card. Thing was she reused the same bank of questions every semester and provided a study packet of sample questions that was a super set of the questions on the final. Some kids got wind of this and encoded the answers to the study packet on the index card. They were bizarrely accused of cheating.
  - MayeulC 5y ago
    I know someone who did something similar in analog electronics. The teacher asked them to come to their office, and asked them a few questions. As the student couldn't answer them, the perfect score was commuted into a failing grade. Regardless of how you approach this, an exam is here to evaluate your level of proficiency on the topic at hand. If you sidestep this, that would be called cheating.
- grishka 5y ago
  A university teacher allowed us to use everything during the exam, including a laptop with an internet connection. The only rule was that you weren't allowed to use any communication with other people, like messaging someone or asking questions on forums. Needless to say, everyone passed that exam. For myself, the most-hated part of every exam session was having to memorize everything. That's what made me fail every single exam I've ever failed. I just can't bring myself to stuff information into my head and then give it back later. It's not a storage device. Yet most other teachers insisted that I need to do everything from memory. 95% of my school and university "education" was to memorize something, then recite it, and then forget it forever.

shakna 5y ago

The ESP-01 is smaller, cheaper, less battery heavy, and already speaks serial so it wouldn't be hard to integrate it, just for the WiFi... And at a quick look there's a bunch of TI<->Arduino stuff out there in the wild it should be easy.

the_third_wave 5y ago
There are many ways to flay this hog, this is more of a thought experiment than a recipe for a TI-CH337. The ultimate hack would be to use a more modern version (with "high-res" screen) and replace/amend the guts with something which emulates the calculator - wabbitemu seems to work just fine [1] - but can also function in other ways. Add some key combination to switch functions and you have a mean lean cheatin' machine. [1] http://wabbitemu.org/ http://wabbitemu.org/

db48x 5y ago

Reminds me of when I was in high school. I found a terminal emulator for my HP48G, built a serial cable to connect it to my 2400 baud modem. I was able to use it to check my email in physics class. Of course I was only able to do that once; the modem was three or four times the size of the calculator with lots of blinkenlights on it, and trailing a phone cable half way across the classroom isn’t very subtle.

tyingq 5y ago

Here someone figured out how to drive the LCD screen from one. https://ripitapart.com/2013/03/02/making-use-of-an-old-ti-83-plus-lcd-screen/ https://ripitapart.com/2013/03/02/making-use-of-an-old-ti-83...

jrmann100 5y ago

I found it a lot of fun to interface with the TI calculators directly using the wonderful ArTICL Arduino library[0]. You can cobble together a link cable to imitate another calculator and hook it up to your microcontroller of choice. I enjoyed making a QWERTY keyboard and news app over WiFi using the tiny ESP-01 (as, coincidentally, @shakna suggested in this thread). 0: https://github.com/KermMartian/ArTICL https://github.com/KermMartian/ArTICL

IIAOPSW 5y ago

There's enough hacks you can do on the 83/84 without hardware gutting tricks. Even in plain old TI Basic. You can easily automate most of a HS curriculum and make an unbeatable tic tac toe program, no internet needed. Its honestly the first coding experience I ever had.

DrSiemer 5y ago

One of my proudest cheats was cramming the keywords of an entire presentation in French on a tiny round piece of paper, stuck to the glass of my wrist watch, so I could literally cheat while the whole class and teacher were watching me. Somehow I actually got away with multiple glances, only receiving a single remark about "being a bit too focused on the duration of my presentation". My cousin, who has always did have good entrepreneurial instincts, actually managed to turn a decent profit selling highly detailed printouts of micro cheatsheets at school.

tener 5y ago
How is having the transcript of the presentation cheating and not just being prepared?
- draugadrotten 5y ago
  It's because school is preparing students for life, where it would be outrageous to have written notes while presenting or speaking. What's next, someone else writing the words for you?
  - Paraesthetic 5y ago
    Whats next, paying someone in a poorer country to write your things for you while you 'work from home'
    - xnzakg 5y ago
      Yeeeah that's already being done for a a bunch of IT courses. Check out some of those "freelance work" sites, it's fairly obvious a bunch of those are someone's homework...
  - grishka 5y ago
    It's because school is preparing students for life, where they would never have any chance to look anything up, and could thus only use their own memory. And that "you won't always have a calculator with you" thing math teachers loved so much? Yeah that didn't age well.

punnerud 5y ago

And if IT use the Cisco management console, they get the location down to 3-7m diameter of every WiFi, Bluetooth, Microwave ++ that is using the same band as WiFi. I was earlier in a startup that made an indoor navigation map, where you could get the blue dot without installing anything, by using this Cisco feature: https://use.mazemap.com https://use.mazemap.com

TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
What is maze map showing me? What is this?
javindo 5y ago
Feels incredibly strange that anyone can publicly view all these office layouts, down to very specific room/corridor/stair layouts, occupancy status, of random private office and university buildings...

danmur 5y ago

My school let you have two calculators so you could have notes on one of them and use the other. I don't really understand why, I'd rather just have paper notes. Fun things to play with though, the HP38G's we had had a nifty infrared communication thing so you could trade stuff with other people.

herbst 5y ago

I cheatet so much with my TI. In every class we were allowed to use a calculator I would literally code everything relevant for the test into this small thingy. I still think I better memorized some of the things as my class mates. Also I loved how it doesn't really communicate except with a cable no one had. So nobody expected me to share my 'cheats'

Spare_account 5y ago
You accidentally prepared for the test while thinking that you were cheating.
- herbst 5y ago
  I did both I guess. And because I could not share it, teachers never bothered.
  - Spare_account 5y ago
    This gives me food for thought. I have young children, all under 10. The challenge is learning how to inspire them; you found a crutch that made learning less of a chore: converting the syllabus into chunks of code. I can already see that the my two eldest will both need very different answers, but if I can figure out what theirs is, I can hopefully help them focus where my childhood mind would wander during study sessions.
    - herbst 5y ago
      You sound like a good parent. For me finding these small ways to cope with the boring reality of schooling really made the difference

lifeisstillgood 5y ago

"I cheated in the finals of my metaphysics exam. I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me" -- Woody Allen Just reminded me.

ornornor 5y ago

One of my university teachers allowed us a double sided letter sized piece of paper during the exam and we could put whatever we felt like on it. This was brilliant because 1. In real life, you don’t memorize random facts. That’s what reference books and the internet is for. 2. Making the cheat sheet actually forced us to understand the material so they we could sum it up and for it on the page. By the time we were done writing the sheet, we had memorized most of it anyway. Yet another demonstration how school is completely out of touch with the jobs they’re claiming to be preparing you for.

pmorici 5y ago
I had an Econ teacher that did something similar but it was a note card. Thing was she reused the same bank of questions every semester and provided a study packet of sample questions that was a super set of the questions on the final. Some kids got wind of this and encoded the answers to the study packet on the index card. They were bizarrely accused of cheating.
- MayeulC 5y ago
  I know someone who did something similar in analog electronics. The teacher asked them to come to their office, and asked them a few questions. As the student couldn't answer them, the perfect score was commuted into a failing grade. Regardless of how you approach this, an exam is here to evaluate your level of proficiency on the topic at hand. If you sidestep this, that would be called cheating.
grishka 5y ago
A university teacher allowed us to use everything during the exam, including a laptop with an internet connection. The only rule was that you weren't allowed to use any communication with other people, like messaging someone or asking questions on forums. Needless to say, everyone passed that exam. For myself, the most-hated part of every exam session was having to memorize everything. That's what made me fail every single exam I've ever failed. I just can't bring myself to stuff information into my head and then give it back later. It's not a storage device. Yet most other teachers insisted that I need to do everything from memory. 95% of my school and university "education" was to memorize something, then recite it, and then forget it forever.