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Hardware Hacking

Overclocking Calculators? 345

Posted by michael from the asymptotic-growth dept.
Klar writes "If you're looking for something new to prove your tech prowess, Richard Piotter has a great how to on overclocking Texas Instruments graphing calculators. You can actually double the cpu speed, which is noticeable when graphing complex functions."
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Overclocking Calculators? More

Overclocking Calculators?

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  • Not only is it faster (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16, 2005 @07:31PM (#11381734)
    But I get better results! Before, 1+1 was always 2, but now it's 2.0358!

  • Next: (Score:4, Funny)

    by Pig Hogger ( 10379 ) <pig DOT hogger AT gmail DOT com> on Sunday January 16, 2005 @07:32PM (#11381738) Journal
    Beowulf clusters of overclocked T.I. calculators!!!

  • From the (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ScrewMaster ( 602015 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @07:33PM (#11381742)
    Too Much Time On Their Hands Department.

  • Sooo.... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Squatchman ( 844798 )
    Slashdot, putting the "New" back in news. [fark.com]

    Personally I think my calculator calculates rather well. If I was going to use it on a gaming platform(what's the point?) then I guess something like this would come in handy.

    • Re:Sooo.... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      As well as yesterday's hack a day [hackaday.com]...

    • Re:Sooo.... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ottothecow ( 600101 )
      Well none of it is really new considering there were plenty of instructions when I got my 83+ in 7th grade. They even prompted me to try to overclock a little 4function calculator...it kind of worked; the screen was sometimes a little garbled but the big square roots were slightly faster.

      Not that I would do something like this to my beautiful TI-89...its amazingly difficult to find one in a store but I really dont like the feel of the titanium's shape or buttons (especially the arrow keys).

      Boo TI for

  • pfft (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16, 2005 @07:33PM (#11381745)
    Pfft, tell me when you've over clocked a pencil and paper.

  • Dammit! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Faust7 ( 314817 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @07:33PM (#11381746) Homepage
    I tried to overclock my slide rule, but it just went up in smoke.

  • Not new at all (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16, 2005 @07:33PM (#11381747)
    This is soooo old. I overclocked my TI calc several years ago, putting a snazzy OC switch on the side. All of my friends were terribly impressed.

    On the other hand, it didn't really help in my classes, except to get the wrong answer faster...

    • In fact... (Score:3, Informative)

      by gotr00t ( 563828 )
      This site was actually featured on ticalc.org extnsively a few years back. It's acutally nothing new.

    • No kidding. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by raygundan ( 16760 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @09:22PM (#11382301) Homepage
      This was going on when I was in high school, 10 years ago. (not that I'm incredibly old, but being ten years behind the curve is spectacular even for slashdot) You could overclock a TI-85 pretty easily, although it wasn't really necessary. The real joy was in installing a hacked ROM through an overflow on the link cable and running games written in Z80 assembly. It was the ultimate time-waster: a gameboy that your teachers allowed in class. TI even caught on later that their overflow bug had become a feature, and built in access to run assembly code on the TI-86.

      There were some truly great games written, too. A few (Sqrxz comes to mind) even eventually made the leap to the gameboy.

      • Re:No kidding. (Score:3, Interesting)

        by afidel ( 530433 )
        Actually there were times when an overclocked Ti-89 would have been quite usefull to me, mostly when doing 3D plots. Plotting a series of partial differentials and rotating them in 3D was quite slow on the 89, on the order of a few seconds per frame. I eventually ran the Ti-89 firmware in an emulator on my laptop which gave ~5x normal performance and the graphing was quite nice at those speeds. Of course then I lost the great input interface, no laptop will ever compare with a dedicated graphing calculator

      • Re:No kidding. (Score:3, Informative)

        by kasperd ( 592156 )
        This was going on when I was in high school, 10 years ago.
        I also heard about this stuff when I was in high school 10 years ago. Some of my friends had TI-85 calculators, but I don't think any of them actually ever overclocked it.

        The real joy was in installing a hacked ROM through an overflow on the link cable and running games written in Z80 assembly.
        I tried some of those. But it wasn't really about hacking the ROM. The ROM was never changed, and if you removed the batteries it would still be restore

    • Re:Not new at all (Score:3, Informative)

      by Drantin ( 569921 ) *
      Actually, not only is the copyright on the website 1996-2000, but I've visited that site before... 4-5 years ago... for a website with more information, go here [ticalc.org]...

  • Cheating (Score:2, Interesting)

    by fembots ( 753724 )
    Will students be caught cheating with these overclocked calculators?

  • It's not just TI calcs that can be OC'd. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Slash Watch ( 849331 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @07:34PM (#11381749) Journal
    Utilities have been coded [hpcalc.org] to overclock HP48/HP49 calculators to a wide range of clock speeds - you can pick and choose what you like, up to 200MHz. This is pretty impressive too - that's more than a doubling of clock speed, IIRC.

  • another hack a day ripp off (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16, 2005 @07:34PM (#11381757)
    tsk tsk tsk how lame from the editors
  • Did this back in '96 on my Ti85.

  • Seen this before (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Stevyn ( 691306 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @07:34PM (#11381764)
    I've seen this for the TI-83 a while ago. I have the TI-89 now and it's great for the classes I take. I've overclocked cpus (AMD K6-2), but you've got to have some balls or some money to try and overclock a $150 calculator.

    It just seems to me that the risk outweighs the benefits.
  • Curently, the TI-81, TI-82, TI-83, TI-85, TI-86, TI-89, TI-92,a nd TI-92 Plus can be accelerated.

    Pfeh. If I can't overclock my TI-2500 Datamath I'm not interested.

  • In the words of... (Score:5, Funny)

    by MightyPez ( 734706 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @07:36PM (#11381779)
    the Futurama cryogenic lab tech.... "Welcooome....To the WOOOOORLD of 5 YEARS AGO!"
  • Can I use a tunable capacitor instead of a switch with a cap in paralell?

    eh, finally a chance to write a working Tetris for my TI82. Yes, wrote Tetris to it, but no amount of optimization could make it run at a speed that would make it any kind of challenge.
    (the pacman on the other hand... I never finished it, hated myself for some levels design)

    • Re:Pot? (Score:3, Informative)

      by BobPaul ( 710574 ) *
      you should have written it in assembly instead of TI-Basic.

      Oh, and a POT is a varriable resistor. I think you might mean a trimmmer.
      • Sorry, would gladly write it in ASM if the API provided that function.
        Didn't want to tap into the RAM directly to upload software :)

    • True story (Score:2, Interesting)

      by tepples ( 727027 )

      Once I wrote a passable Tetris clone in TI BASIC to waste my spare time in class. Then I ported it to QBasic, and it started running at acceptable speeds even on an old-ass 8088. Then I turned it into C and made it run inside a graphical environment; this formed part of freepuzzlearena [pineight.com]. Years later, I added a hallucinogen-simulating graphic distortion layer, first for the PC and then for the Game Boy Advance, resulting in TOD [pineight.com].

  • ...when plotting real-valued functions.

    Ha ha. I kill me.

  • battery drain (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16, 2005 @07:37PM (#11381786)
    This has been known for years. Keep in mind that overclocking by 2x drains the batteries by 2x as well.

    • Re:battery drain (Score:4, Informative)

      by ivan37 ( 149147 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @08:52PM (#11382178)
      Indeed - years ago I overclocked my TI-86. After about 6 months I got really sick of buying new batteries and having the calc die when I needed it, so bought an 89 and sold the overclocked 86 to a friend for a pretty good price (although I think he regretted it later).

      If you are going to overclock your calculator, make sure you've got some rechargable batteries and always have extras on hand.

    • Re:battery drain (Score:4, Informative)

      by Jeff DeMaagd ( 2015 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @09:11PM (#11382257) Homepage Journal
      Keep in mind that overclocking by 2x drains the batteries by 2x as well.

      It's not linear and there are a lot of factors. The switching current goes up by a factor of four for every frequency doubling. There's leakage current that stays constant regardless of clock, I think. And that's not saying anything about the rest of the circuits that might not be on the same clock, the CPU might not be a huge power drain in some circuits.

  • What about a wrist watch? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Mario21 ( 310404 ) <{ee.liam} {ta} {12oiram}> on Sunday January 16, 2005 @07:37PM (#11381787)
    I overclocked my casio wrist watch. Now I have all the time I need.

  • This isn't new... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Cubeman ( 530448 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @07:39PM (#11381796)
    I don't know what's wrong with the slashdot submission process, but this isn't a new site.

    That site has been around for nine years, and in fact it doesn't list any of the popular TI graphing calculators today. The TI-83 Plus, 84 Plus, 92 Plus, and Voyage 200 are all missing. (Incidentally, this [ovh.net] French guide will show you how to overclock your 83 Plus).

    Sure it's a great site for overclocking older calculators, but please don't say "something new" when this has been widely known for years.
  • I overclocked my TI-85 long ago, so that Daedalus (i think that was the name of it), a 3D grayscale game, would run better....

    it was nice. I even had the switch to turn it off so that my batteries would last longer during class :)

    --buddy
  • I just discovered a bug/feature on the TI-85! If you do a full backup from another calculator or computer, you can have the PROGRAM commands set to arbitrary memory locations! This means that we can now run fast custom assembly language routines on calculators.
    • Hehe I remember that...
      Me and another guy on the TI-85 assembly ML figured out how to display grayscale on the 1-bit screen by rapidly flipping video pages while adjusting the contrast. I fondly remember looking at 4-bit grayscale nudie pics in 10th grade math class. :)

  • RC oscillator (Score:5, Informative)

    by morcheeba ( 260908 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @07:43PM (#11381825) Journal
    Wow, the TI-89 [solarbotics.net] uses an RC oscillator for its clock! That kind of clock is one of the cheapest [maxim-ic.com] and least accurate, so I wouldn't want to run a real-time-clock off of it. I wonder if they have some sort of calibration mechanism on the production line, or if the processors are so underclocked already that they will surely work with a large variation of clock speeds. Even after leaving the production line, RC clocks drift and are more sensitive to temperature, so TI must always leave plenty of speed margin.
    • don't worry. The batteries would die before you'd get 2 seconds of error.

      These are calculators. You switch it on, calculate what you want, switch it off. My keeping them on for 2-3 hours a time was a serious abuse.

    • Re:RC oscillator (Score:5, Informative)

      by Sycraft-fu ( 314770 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @08:57PM (#11382201)
      That's precisely the case. The 89s use Motorola 68000s as their CPUs. You know, the same thing that the orignal Mac used. There has been just a few years of refinement that has gone in to it. Basically, they don't really care about precise clock speeds. It just needs to be in the ballpark of 10MHz, and only that since they decided it was an acceptable tradeoff of speed and power consumption.

      I imagine that the chip is easily capable at running well over double it's nominal frequency, and infact probably other things would become a problem before it would. You have to remember, these are realyl simple devices. They don't need the precise timings that desktop computers have. For one thing they simply don't have a bunch of buses running at different, but related, speeds.

      It's not a precision timing device or anything like that, it's a calculator. It's just made to give you easy, portable access to lots of common math functions. It doesn't need to have a precise clock. If my 89 executes a calculation in 5 minutes and yours in 4.9 minutes, we aren't really going to give a damn.
    • Wow, the TI-89 uses an RC oscillator for its clock!

      So they haven't changed, then.

      I remember overclocking TI-58/58C/59 programmable calculators in 1980. They too had just a simple RC oscillator.

      I seem to recall that they worked fine at up to about five times the standard speed, with the one exception that the magnetic card reader in the TI-59 [ti59.com] didn't work when overclocked.
  • Wow! TI calculators can graph complex functions? Cool. I wonder how they portray four real dimensions.

    • Re:Graphing complex functions? (Score:4, Funny)

      by oobob ( 715122 ) * on Sunday January 16, 2005 @07:58PM (#11381921)
      You graph complex numbers in the complex plane, silly =) One axis is the real axis and the other is the imaginary axis. Here's [mathforum.org] a brief intro from the math forum (a written intro, without graphics), and here's [uiuc.edu] some more examples from a graphic intensive site that shows how you can perform operations on complex numbers like vectors. You can also do neat stuff like find the complex roots of numbers by manuiplating the graph, which is also mentioned in the 2nd site.
  • i'm sure the fact that theres more games then math programs in ticalc.org's asm sections will tell you what the extra cycles would be used for......
  • Overclocking was done with switch which added capacitance when in parallel to get 2X.

    Switch was flipped with magnetic rubbed down side of case and reed switch flipped accordingly.

    Worked well on several modaseels (C/CV/CX) I had for internal calcs but not for card reader though which was rate dependent though!

    Speaking of which also did internal 10 bit machine code using EPROMS - anyone remember the really neat "microcode" listings "published" within the PPC club based in US?

    We had some members in Sydney
    • My HP 41C was overclocked in around 1984 or so, in the US. There was a company that sold the upgrade kit. It doesn't have a magnetic switch; it is controlled through a little tiny push button that is installed where the power plug opening is for the rechargeable battery pack option.

      I think it is more than 2x, though. I thought it was 4x, but I could be wrong.

      The overclock mode works great, except when you try to print through the IR port.

      • Actual overclocking rate varied in actual speedup vs reliability. (nothing new under the sun!)

        2x was rock solid across several models and I recall other members getting 2.something before straying into areas of unreliability above that.

        Of course we "only" had air cooled models so perhaps some mad scandinavian with -40c temps managed 4x but with the thick gloves necessary perhaps was never able to actually press the little black buttons to use at that speed! ;-)

        Alex.
    • PPC! I used to hang at the PPC headquarters in Orange County on the weekends. Obviously I did not have a life.

      Yeah, I did the microcode stuff. I had the "dan rom" (I think that's what it was called) for easy entry of op codes. My big project was a microcode debugger that allowed you to single step through your code by emulating the instructions, but I never did release the program.

      The one important thing programming the HP-41CV taught me was optmizing for space. We were always trying to remove just a

  • Actually quite useful. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SharpFang ( 651121 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @07:56PM (#11381909) Homepage Journal
    Laugh all you want, these calculators are capable of stuff that's really time consuming.
    Put

    Y1=(somefunction)
    Y2=FnInt(Y1(X),X,0,X)

    Y2 displays integral of Y1. This isn't docummented anywhere and not without a reason. Getting the plot of even a simple function like Y1=sin(X) takes some 5 minutes as the integral is calculated separately for each pixel. Put more sophisticated function for Y1, or put Y3=FnInt(Y2... to get second integral and wait 2 hours or so for results easily.

    In this case overclocking serves saving the batteries. True at double speed the batteries are used up nearly twice as much, but running for a hour at a single speed will drain them more than running for half a hour at double speed.

    And yeah, these "insane" times are quite reasonable. I've been writing some cool stuff for my TI82. Generating a fractal took maybe a hour or so. "brute forcing" some logical problem lasted only 15 minutes just thanks to some luck (the solution was within first 5% tested). I found the graphs of integrals useful - I entered the function on the start of a test and could test whether my calculations were correct when it was drawn about the middle (and I had to use the calculator for other calculations). It was actually pretty fast at "your generic" numerical methods, and as we were free to choose the platform/language for writing our "numerical methods" programs, I didn't have to show up in the lab even once whole semester, wrote everything on the calculator.
    One thing that sucks is lack of recursion support, Even the Prog[NAME]/Return function works only 1 level deep. But even this can be solved by using lists instead of local variables, matrices instead of lists.
    • Is why you wouldn't run equations like that on something with a bit more power. The PC does not lack for software that can do mathematical calcuations. You can do that stuff pretty fast is you throw a P4 at it.

      I certianly don't discount the cool factor of OCing a calculator, however if I'm doing calculations on it that are taking over an hour, it's time to throw more hardware at the problem.
    • Seriously, if it takes 5 minutes to do an integral, then those calculators are ripe for reprogramming.

      Seriously.

      You could quite possibly do a numeric integral, faster, with paper and pencil.

      http://csm.jmu.edu/physics/rudmin/ParkerSochacki. h tm [jmu.edu]

      At this link, the author shows how to solve (exactly, numerically) a previously unsolvable system of differential equations using a relatively new (~12 yrs old) method.

      Program your calculator to do that, and you'll be lightyears ahead of the competition.

    • Re:Actually quite useful. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Geoffreyerffoeg ( 729040 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @10:57PM (#11382719)
      This isn't docummented anywhere and not without a reason.

      No, it isn't documented anywhere, except the calculator manual, pretty much every calculus textbook oriented towards the TI-8x, and even the MATH menu on the calculator....

      Y3=FnInt(Y2...

      You sound like you've never tried this (at least not on a recent calculator). On the 83 series, it gives ERR:ILLEGAL NEST, mainly because it'd take so long.

      I've been writing some cool stuff for my TI82.

      Ah. No wonder. The 83 runs slightly faster, the 83+ runs faster, the 83+ Silver runs considerably faster, and the 84+es run considerably faster than those. If you're writing fractals and brute force stuff, you'd do well to invest in the latest 84+ -- or even an 89-series. Do yourself a favor and sell the 82 on Ebay or give it to a teacher.

      You say yours takes 5 minutes for fnInt(sin(X)). Mine, an 83+ Silver, takes about 20 seconds. Annoying, yes, but hindering, no. And it's safer than overclocking.

      Incidentally, if you're running into the limits of TI-BASIC programming, you might be interested in learning assembler for the calculator. Just Google for "TI-82 ASM tutorial" or somesuch; there's plenty of tutorials of varying quality.

  • TI long in tooth? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cgenman ( 325138 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @07:57PM (#11381913) Homepage
    What happened to graphing calculator development? While I was in High School there was this burst of activity with the TI line, with frequent new models and upgrades. And then they stalled. And stymed. I got a TI-92 Plus my senior year in High School, and that has stayed TI's top-of-the-line ever since. It's like they've done zero development for the past ten years. You can get full color-screen Game Boy Advances with hardware far in advance of what you would find in a TI for about 100 dollars less, yet you have to use hardware trickery to fake greyscale on these dinosaurs. Their Ancient. Years after I've graduated college, they're still the best you can get. Now they're called the Voyage 200, but they're still the same 68000 - based calc with very similar limitations.

    Where is somebody to steal TI's crown? Somebody has to recognize the power of full-color 3D graphics in mathematics. Doesn't anyone want the market TI has abandoned?

    • TI seems to be catering now to the same crowd that puts neon lights in their computer cases. TI has stopped creating new calculators with new features, and instead continues to rehash their old models. They have gone through several iterations of their lower end model (which started as the TI-81). Now they are up to the TI-84 Plus Silver edition, or something silly like that -which has a fast processor, a ton of memory, a flashy case, USB ports, but retains the same size screen as the TI-81 (96x64 pixels
  • post everything on hack a day week? hackaday.com
  • Look what I got for the value of Pi after I overclocked my Ti! What a cool hack! 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937 5 105820974944 59230781640628620899862803482534211706798214808651 3282306647 09384460955058223172535940812848111745028410270193 8521105559 64462294895493038196442881097566593344612847564823 3786783165 27120190914564856692346034861045432664821339360726 0249141273 72458700660631558817488152092096282925409171536436 7892590360 01133053054882046652138414695194151160943305727036
  • This web page has not been updated since 2000... I remeber back in the day this was new and cool. 5 years though in internet time is like rediscovering the slide rule -- good job guys! I hear IBM are releasing the teletype II any day :)

    its funny the progression that this story has taken -- it went from hackaday --> fark --> slashdot, and doubtless appeared on hackaday due to someone trying this trick out.

  • Yet ANOTHER hackaday plagarism (Score:4, Insightful)

    by FredThompson ( 183335 ) <<moc.gnirpsdnim> <ta> <nospmohtderf>> on Sunday January 16, 2005 @08:06PM (#11381965)
    This is the SECOND repeat of a hackaday post in less than 24 hours.

    That makes 3 or 4 in as many days.

    How about something original, not plagiarized from another site WHICH WAS PROMOTED ON SLASHDOT A LITTLE WHILE AGO!!!!
    • Slashdot is just reprinting Fark.com submissions. This calculator story shows up there this afternoon, and a few hours later it's here...

      Nevermind that the Fark comments ALSO point out how this site 1) is a repeat on both sites, and 2) hasn't even been updated since 2000. Good job, submitter... good job, "editor."
  • At least the TI calculator I have runs on a Z80 processor, which you can easily code for using a cross compiler. Fun stuff!

    A friend of mine wrote a Windows clone for his TI-83. You would shit your pants. You could click the Start button, it would pop up a few applications and you could run clones of notepad and some other scary stuff. Had nested menus and a desktop. Had a built in remote chat app. Although it was nifty, it used up about 90% of your memory and all the CPU power. The irony did not escape us.
  • We were overclocking our HP-41CVs a decade ago. I have this little work-horse sitting in front of me this very moment. It has a magnetic switch for enabling/disabling the speed improvement (pass a magnet across the back). The overclocking rates at about 1.8 times the original speed, but you sacrifice battery life for that performance boost. I don't bother kicking up the speed these days as I never do complicated calculations with it any more.
  • Does this work on the TI-86? because if it does, it means better Super Mario and better Tetris for all.
  • OK how to go about OCing a calculator that uses reverse Polish notation? Put an Intel 8086 on the barby?
  • Does this significantly shorten battery life?
  • it seems that many articles are being taken from http://hackaday.com This and the altiods mp3 player were both featured there.

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