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| What calculator do you use ? |
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| jerry507:
I love this thread. Like many of you I have a deep (strange) love for calculators. I read Zads blog post and it resonated with me quite a bit, so while I was doing other things last night I thought about my own calculator experience. I had a TI-89 for most of college and loved it. I also used Matlab a lot, like many of you. I realized that I used my TI-89 entirely for hand calculations, but never used it's programability. I rarely used Matlab for those sort of hand calculations, and when I did 90% of the time they ended up morphing into a program. I largely credit this to the power of Matlab, the ease of entering data, and also the ease of graphing the results. I'd often end up with a dozen graphs. However I hate the time investment in starting it up, and a laptop burns a lot of power doing things that aren't making my computations. Generally this isn't an issue for the desk which is why I think the calculator market is in trouble. What I really wanted to know, and I think will give us more insight into what calculator we use and why we hate newer ones, is what we actually use calculators (of all forms including Matlab) for these days. I work in embedded design and software, and I rarely use a calculator these days. My main applications are simple math for footprint dimensions and converting numbers between variable bases. What about everyone else? |
| pullin-gs:
Mine makes a great shop space-heater also. |
| HLA-27b:
--- Quote from: jerry507 on April 26, 2012, 03:48:21 pm ---What I really wanted to know, and I think will give us more insight into what calculator we use and why we hate newer ones, is what we actually use calculators (of all forms including Matlab) for these days. I work in embedded design and software, and I rarely use a calculator these days. My main applications are simple math for footprint dimensions and converting numbers between variable bases. What about everyone else? --- End quote --- What I do most these days is playing with graphs. Below for example is a constant power source giving 10W (red trace) and a Thevenin source of 2V in series with 10 Ohm resistor (green). By playing with sliders I can see how they behave. In this instance there is 4.14 Volts between nodes and 2.41 A flowing trough the circuit. Hard to do this with hardware calculators so I've been going through many pieces of software lately. So far the big CAS packages that I tried needed scripting to do this - they are powerful but scripting is not my thing really. Small programs seem more practical and this is one of the better ones so far. It comes with the much despised (and probably rightly so) TI-nspire. Unfortunately it is not good enough to be worth the quarter of the price they ask for it, so after the trial period is over back to open source CAS packages it is. Now, if some brilliant chap decides to write a good practical GUI for Maxima that would be super super awesome, just sayin'. |
| alm:
Not sure if a CAS is really what you need. Later versions of Maple offer a GUI for example, but clicking on a function and selecting 'solve for x' only takes you so far. You will need to type commands for the advanced functions that make people spend serious money for these packages. Plotting simple functions is not exactly their target market. It's not going to be any cheaper than the TI software either. Sounds like you rather need a good interactive plotting application. Not sure what to recommend, since I tend to focus on the CAS side. MathStudio might do what you want, it makes it relatively easy to add scroll bars to graphs (Scroll(variable,start,end,step)), and is much cheaper than many of the other commercial packages. Of the open-source packages, Sage can do interactive graphs, but this involves some scripting. |
| HLA-27b:
--- Quote from: alm on April 26, 2012, 09:28:03 pm ---Not sure if a CAS is really what you need. Later versions of Maple offer a GUI for example, but clicking on a function and selecting 'solve for x' only takes you so far. You will need to type commands for the advanced functions that make people spend serious money for these packages. Plotting simple functions is not exactly their target market. It's not going to be any cheaper than the TI software either. Sounds like you rather need a good interactive plotting application. Not sure what to recommend, since I tend to focus on the CAS side. MathStudio might do what you want, it makes it relatively easy to add scroll bars to graphs (Scroll(variable,start,end,step)), and is much cheaper than many of the other commercial packages. Of the open-source packages, Sage can do interactive graphs, but this involves some scripting. --- End quote --- Thank you alm, as helpful as always. I have tried Mathematica as well as most open source software except Sage which I can not run because I am tied to a win machine due to solidworks, the single piece of code that ties me to windows. Sage can be run with an emulator of course but it is just too clumsy that way, not really worth it for me, might be better for somebody who actually knows what he is doing. Math studio seems nice and is remarkably similar to what the creators of SpeedCrunch anounced they want to achieve, and honestly if I am paying money I much rather donate it to open source people. One software that is open source and has a nice user interface is GeoGebra which makes use of Maxima code. Currenly geared mostly towards school geometry and some graphing. Perhaps they are the closest team to achieve a well rounded business like graphical interface. Mathemathica and the TI program above share one good feature - the ability to create documents with in-line interactive math and graphing. A most useful feature if you wanted to create a math heavy document describing, say, propagation delay in PCB traces. TI's program shoots itself in the foot by not being open source, Mathematica less so because they provide a free player at least. With the advent of the MathMl and free CAS programs the open source community is uniquely situated to make such a document format and spread it widely. I can think of at least 50 such documents for everyday electronics work alone. |
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