Touch Screen For Graphing Calculator

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyWIJFLbJZ0]

[Owen] got down and dirty by adding a touchscreen to his TI-84 graphing calculator. The dirty part is the z80 assembly code he wrote to use the linkport as a UART (assembly always makes us feel queasy). Once that was working he implemented some commands using an Arduino and then hooked up an Nintendo DS touch screen. Now he’s got this proof of concept video where he draws on the screen, that input is interpreted by the Arduino, commands are sent through the UART, and the calculator program draws on the screen. Adding a touch screen to something is a lot more impressive when you have to go to these lengths to get it working. Nice job!

26 thoughts on “Touch Screen For Graphing Calculator

  1. hmm, im going to have to make this! I just happen to have a TI-84 calculator and a nintendo DS touch screen lying around, with nothing else intended for them. interesting coincidence…

  2. I don’t quite understand what the idea is in regards to endresult, what do you do with a touchscreen on a calculator exactly? I don’t mean this dismissive, I’m just curious.

  3. Geez, I’ve got two friends that program in z80 assembly. It’s not too hard.

    HAD, if you guys are afraid of assembly language then you guys should go back to BASIC.

  4. Yeah, no shit. The VERY FIRST programming project I ever did was programming a Z80 in assembly.

    It’s like, “welcome to electronics college, here’s a z80 and these are the available instructions; make an alarm clock.”

  5. >The dirty part is the z80 assembly code

    Assembly.. oh no~~~! What do you guys write your startup code in?

    >(assembly always makes us feel queasy).

    Not all machines use the same magical “assembly”. The Z80 is actually pretty nice to work with in assembly.

  6. Assembly is epic.
    Machine code is more epic.
    Of course, we all know that REAL hackers use a magnetic needle to write machine code bit by bit directly to a hard drive disk.

  7. I can’t help but thinking, if a few more young people learned assembly (like us tired old farts had to in college whether we liked it or not) we’d see some better quality code in all kinds of devices…

  8. I program in 8051 assembly all the time. I prefer using C, but there’s some things you can’t do in C that you need to do in assembly (like messing around with the stack, startup code, interrupt vectors…) Oh and I’m 21, so some of us youngsters know what’s up

  9. I’m currently in college and just finished a Microprocessor class last year, Our professor made us learn Freescale HC12 Assembly, It sucked! Although i actually got pretty good at it and after that I started my Senior project, i’m programming an ATtiny in C and i actually missed the control i got with Assembly. The hardest part is learning to think like a machine. As fast and powerful as computers get they are still stupid. As far as any future hacks i’ll stick with C unless my project is extremely time dependent.

  10. I can confirm this is fake guys. I go to school with owen and am also on the robotics team with him.He could barely program a basic board let alone do something like this.its just timing. hes that terrible of a programmer and even claims hes working on a way to scale down bioshock and games like that for a ti calculator which is complete bs

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