I had not heard of this project before and I ordered one after reading this article and I have to say that everything about their web UI/UX experience is world class. Possibly some of the best I've ever seen. Their simulator[1] is accurate AND responsive to even weird mobile form factors.
The web site is snappy and has zero cruft. I feel like their design was inspired by or comes from the same school as Teenage Engineering, who made the OP-1 synthesizer.
These cats are doing amazing work. This is a masterpiece.
I've got two of these and I love them. One if for development and has the 10 pin debug connector soldered in, the other is in its "standard" form for the most part except that it exfiltrates the UART because part of my plan is a make it the visual output of an VNA.
The only complaint I have (and its minor) is that the contrast on the case is poor. A black case with white, light blue, and orange labels would have been stellar, with the white case things fade into the background.
This is actually one of the biggest reasons I’ve not bought one already. The colour selection is deeply flawed in my opinion. I say opinion but it’s my opinion based on years of paying attention to user experience and ergonomics. It has a low contrast and low contrast is bad on items intended for swift and decisive use. Sure, too high of a contrast will be bad, but that’s partly dependent on font and other aspects of the design as to when it becomes “too high contrast”, regardless of that, this colour scheme is far too low contrast.
Since nothing but the logo is printed on the case (the button membrane has all the symbols directly printed on it), unlike say the swiss micros, you could very, very easily take it apart and spray it another color.
Played a bit with the online simulator and immediately ordered one for my son (high school). Great UI, I could immediately print a function, realize that it was showing sin() in degrees and immediately found how to change it in radians and to cap the graph to x between -5 and 5. Trivial things but usually I don't find my way easily in a calculator that I do not know because most UIs suck.
I very much like the idea of this calculator, particularly since it has a python implementation. However, there are a couple of caveats - it uses binary arithmetic, though since release it seems they've improved the accuracy, and also I'm not sure how free this license is[1]. For something that isn't open-source, but uses RPN and has quad-precision binary-encoded decimal precision the DM42 looks really nice[2].
There is an ongoing discussion about what license to use for what part of the project, and what is the rational behind such and such choice. See this Github issue: https://github.com/numworks/epsilon/issues/38
SwissMicros calculators are beautiful, I have a 15L and will be adding a DM42 as soon as they are available. If you are thinking of ordering any of their products, you will not be disappointed!
+1. The site is beautiful, but isn't good for older eyes. Too many sites seem to do this nowadays. I applaud them for their creativity, but they need an older person to test-drive it.
yeah unfortunately this is the norm these days for "beauty", even though it goes against every single guideline on the topic. and of course numworks most certainly knows this.
How is this "Open Source"[1] when everything is licensed CC BY-NC-ND? What was the point of releasing anything if changes can't be made or shared? One might as well get a TI-84 since there are FOSS firmware replacements [2] and it would be much more free than this.
I would have bought one of these if the license was not so restrictive.
Out of the box, there are Python scripts for calculating factorials, generating visual representations of Mandelbrot fractals, and finding roots of polynomials. On the NumWorks workshop, there are dozens of user-contributed scripts that perform various interesting functions and calculations. They've built a great open-source community, and the speed of their team in responding to issues and pull requests on Github is impressive.
Secondly, as someone who had to use various TI calculators in school, trying to get TI Connect software to work was a huge pain. NumWorks lets you install software patches and transfer scripts directly from Chrome, with a one-time driver installation. Not having to deal with bloated and finnicky calculator connection software has been very enjoyable.
You are missing the point. These are calculators designed specifically for the high school market, with the special, mandated by law, exam mode and restricted functions. Nobody else really needs one.
BTW, the Prime is $50 more expensive than this thing and doesn't have the exam mode -> illegal to use in exams in France, for ex.
It's based on MicroPython, which is designed to run in highly constrained embedded environments. You can do quite a lot with 256KB of RAM, MicroPython is surprisingly efficient.
If you're looking for something for engineering, check out the HP 50g. It's discontinued, but it definitely trades blows with the TI 89ti (it even has an IRDA port, SD card slot, and an RS232 port). It's fundamentally an RPN machine, but the stack acts more like a command line, holding objects like equations, variables, and even programs.
For something smaller, there's the Swissmicros DM42. That one is definitely an engineers tool, but it's exclusively RPN. It's basically a super modern HP 42s with a huge, georgeous screen and a USB interface (and a modern ARM MCU). The software is based on the excellent Free42 project.
I’ve had the 49G, the 50G, and the Prime. I definitely enjoy the latter, though I don’t like it’s gimmicks (such as the touch screen) I do some solid work on it. The CAS is quite serviceable for my level of algebraic manipulation, for anything it can’t handle I either use my brain or plod over to Mathematica (depending on mood, mostly).
The fx-991 fx-115, HP 35s, and TI 36x Pro are the best calculators allowed on the Fundamentals of Engineering and Principles of engineering exams in the US.
In my view, it's sad that kids don't use computational tools such as CAS or Jupyter in school. Ironically, they're the ones who are supposed to be "digital natives," but their math tools are in the stone age compared with what I get to use in the real world. Perhaps if kids were allowed to ease their way into computation, "coding" wouldn't be a great big fearful hurdle when they get older.
The TI graphing calculators exist solely to support the testing regime, which serves no pedagogic purpose.
Granted, I own a calculator -- $10 Casio solar -- but I grew up with one, and it's just easy to grab and use, especially in the workshop or lab. I also still have an analog watch. But there's no reason to impose my old habits on the young generation.
A couple of reasons are cost and being distracted. If you give kids a computer, they'll definitely prefer to dig around in it doing absolutely anything besides school work, no matter how boring the other things on the computer are. And plenty of poor kids can't afford to just carry a laptop around every day, which means risking losing or smashing it. Schools can have them but they won't be instantly available - there'll be 10 minutes of class wasted getting out the laptop cart and signing them out and collecting them back in, and dealing with kids fighting each other over them. It's a massive pain. I've done that and it's not at all practical for daily use. Then how do they do their homework if the CAS computer's at school? I've heard of schools using Chromebooks and Ipads, which might address some of those problems, but not as well as a basic scientific calculator.
I'm an engineer and I use a calculator frequently. I'll use a full computer for more involved calculations, but it's hard to beat the convenience of a calculator that is ready to go immediately for quick computations.
Often a CAS isn't even that useful anyway, they're still pretty shit for any sort of complicated symbolic calculations. As a simple example, even doing basic vector calculus in Mathematica is clunky and barely usable.
Yeah I'm aware, they're just limited. My problem is that they are focused on component-wise manipulation. There's not a good way to do symbolic manipulation of generic vectors/matrices/tensors AFAIK. It's improved though and you can now do some useful things with it- the vector calculus related tools used to be in an external module and truly barely worked.
Edit: the same applies to tensors. Mathematica is actually pretty elegant for working with concrete tensors IMO, but kinda sucks for symbolic manipulation. Not that it's an easy problem to solve. It's like that with pretty much every CAS and I think it will be a while time before we have a good grip on how to do such things with a computer.
I've weaned myself off a physical calculator with Insect ( https://insect.sh/ ) with the webpage stored on my computer but it's still slow to launch and slow to enter things. The main advantage over a physical one for me is copying and pasting to other programs which I do a lot of. The main downside is not enough precision, so I go for Windows calculator when I need more digits. I just wish it was actually high precision like it claims to be :(
> Everything can be done better and faster in a cas on a laptop.
Everything except actually typing in the problem. A good specialized keyboard and input method (RPN) will always beat QWERTY, especially one that doesn't even have a number pad.
I hate to be a naysayer here (because I actually like the idea of this calculator) but I use R for virtually every mathematical and statistical problem I encounter. It's always open on my computer while I'm working and I'm comfortable enough with the program that most of the syntax requires little thought on my part.
If I'm in the field and need to perform some calculations, I either use my phone (for simple calculations) or my $17 Casio statistics calculator.
As a risk assessor and environmental scientist, I have NEVER needed anything more than these.
I have a TI-89 emulator in my android phone. I use it all the time from simple calculations to graphing. I think I might have used the calculus functions a couple of times. Anyway, it's really convenient and now I wouldn't even think about carrying around another device that only does what a calculator does.
Would this be a good calculator to get for actual engineering work, or is it too limited by its testing restrictions? If not, what is a good engineering calculator these days?
This calculator is made for high school math, not science. Its main concession to exam rules is a special mode that you don't have to engage. Outside of that mode, the big feature that's still missing is a Computer Algebra System.
But what's usually not even on people's radar is whether the calculator can handle units. The line of HP calculators that ended with the HP 50g had the most useful system I've seen for computation on quantities with units. It serves both as a type checking safety feature and provides automatic conversion. TI's top graphing calculators have had similar functionality since at least the TI-89/92 generation, but (as usual) without a good user interface to make it worth using. The NumWorks calculator does not appear to have any capability for unit conversions, let alone carrying units throughout calculations.
Looks great, but there are a couple things that I think they could work on:
> $99.99
This is in-line with, or slightly above, other players in the market (e.g. TI, Casio). I'd love to see someone challenge them in this space with something that's like $25. I can get a cheap $10 scientific calculator that does 60% of the same things for $10, so it really seems like there is a spot here for a lower price point. Especially since the hardware is so "old".
> 20+ hours of use on a single charge
A couple hundred hours would be nice. The benefit of a normal calculator is that it works without charging really being a thing that most people have to worry about.
If they're going for quality, it's hard for a small operation to beat the larger players on price. Presumably as they become more well known, they can go for higher volume shipments and benefit more from economy of scale.
I'd agree a good old-fashioned set of AAA batteries like my old TI would've been a better choice though, everyone's been pushing rechargeable batteries, but beyond the need for recharging regularly, they degrade over time and are often a pain to replace.
> A couple hundred hours would be nice. The benefit of a normal calculator is that it works without charging really being a thing that most people have to worry about.
This is almost certainly due to using what looks like either a transmissive LCD or an OLED display, which require a lot of power.
How would an E-ink display work for a calculator? I haven't used them for more than about 20 minutes in my life, but as long as there isn't a lot of lag while typing, it seems line it'd be a good choice.
Much of the time a calculator is glanced at while doing math on paper or sitting idle while waiting for the next input. A 0-energy display would be ideal for this. It'd be interesting to see a breakdown of energy and energy consumption by part on a calculator.
The web site is snappy and has zero cruft. I feel like their design was inspired by or comes from the same school as Teenage Engineering, who made the OP-1 synthesizer.
These cats are doing amazing work. This is a masterpiece.
[1] https://www.numworks.com/simulator/
[2] https://www.teenageengineering.com/products/op-1