mechanical switch

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A black OLED screen with a happy face displayed upon it is situated at the top of a squarish calculator with a 5x6 grid of white calculator keys. It floats above a graphing calculator, Nintendo Switch, aigo numpad, and an Arduino Mega on a white table. A handful of differently-colored kalih choc switches are in various places around the table.

Mechanical Switch Sci-Calc Is Also A Macropad

October 4, 2024 by 6 Comments

Smartphones have replaced a desktop calculator for most folks these days, but sometimes that tactility is just what you need to get the mathematical juices flowing. Why not spruce up the scientific calculator of yore with the wonders of modern microcontrollers?

While you won’t be able to use Sci-Calc on a standardized test, this classy calculator will let you do some pretty cool things while clacking on its mechanical choc switches. Is it a calculator? Obviously. Is it an Arduboy-compatible device that can play simple games like your TI-84? Yes. Is it also a macropad and ESP32 dev board? Why not? If that isn’t enough, it’s also takes both standard and RPN inputs.

[Shao Duan] has really made this device clean and the menu system that rewrites main.bin based on the program selection is very clever. Escape writes main.bin back into the ROM from the SD card so you can select another application. A few classic games have already been ported, and the process looks fairly straightforward for any of your own favorites.

If you’re hankering for more mathy inputs, checkout the Mathboard or the MCM/70 from 1974.

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Reverse Time Back To The Days Of RPN

September 26, 2024 by 68 Comments

While Texas Instruments maintains dominance in the calculator market (especially graphing calculators), there was a time when this wasn’t the case. HP famously built the first portable scientific calculator, the HP-35, although its reverse-Polish notation (RPN) might be a bit of a head-scratcher to those of us who came up in the TI world of the last three or four decades. Part of the reason TI is so dominant now is because they were the first to popularize infix notation, making the math on the calculator look much more like the math written on the page, especially when compared to the RPN used by HP calculators. But if you want to step into a time machine and see what that world was like without having to find a working HP-35, take a look at [Jeroen]’s DIY RPN calculator.

Since the calculator is going to be RPN-based, it needs to have a classic feel. For that, mechanical keyboard keys are used for the calculator buttons with a custom case to hold it all together. It uses two rows of seven-segment displays to show the current operation and the results. Programming the Arduino Nano to work as an RPN calculator involved a few tricks, though. [Jeroen] wanted a backspace button, but this disrupts the way that the Arduino handles the input and shows it on the display but it turns out there’s an Arudino library which solves some of these common problems with RPN builds like this.

One of the main reasons that RPN exists at all is that it is much easier for the processor in the calculator to understand the operations, even if it makes it a little bit harder for the human. This is because early calculators made much more overt use of a stack for performing operations in a similar way to Assembly language. Rather than learning Assembly, an RPN build like this can be a great introduction to this concept. If you want to get into the weeds of Assembly programming this is a great place to go to get started.