I'm hungry for an update on the DIY4X project. Any news on case material and manufacture? What's the status of the code? Any sort of deadlines or such?

All further work is on DIY5. At the HHC conference there was an overwhelming lack of interest in a 41C-compatible calculator; all of the interest was in calculators more like the 42S and WP-34S.

Case material is ABS plastic.

If there was any news I'd have posted it here already.

Hi Eric, I recently watched the HHC video with your talk. I could not see the raise of hands when you asked "41 vs. 42 ALPHA style", but I hope the "soft ALPHA" didn't win.... or it did?

Looking forward to DIY5!

AFAIK, alpha letters are requested to be printed on the keyplate like on the WP 34S.

My recollection is that no one wanted to the 42S-style alpha soft menu.

How would the extended symbols/punctuation characters be entered? For example, might '&' be entered like this: [ALPHA] [g SHIFT] [9] ?

Quote:

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no one wanted to the 42S-style alpha soft menu.

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Thank goodness for that :-)

Not decided yet. Please see pp.62 and 129 of the WP 34S manual for a viable approach on a platform not allowing for menus. Keyboard space is still limited - so some mental links are necessary to avoid clutter - while menu space is abundant on a DIY5 allowing for softkeys.

Edited: 13 Nov 2012, 5:05 a.m.

I think it would be perfectly fine to have a character menu in addition to the character-per-key ALPHA mode. Didn't the 48 have that?

I kind of like the way the HP42s does menus

Surely you don't like using the menu for ALPHA mode? Everyone else seems to prefer the character-per-key approach, like the 41 and 48.