Just bought 17bII+ and Let and Get are back!
#1

FYI. Looks like an update under the hood has occurred.

Good news! Thanks HP!

John

#2

Hi John,

Thank you very much for the heads up. There had been a post here some months back, from either Eddie Shore or one of the other contributors with interest in business programming, about having spoken to customer service about the 17bii+. Apparantly, he was told, at that time, that the L() and G() would be returned--and so they have!


Please let us know more about the machina, as you use it. for instance, is the keyboard reliable? do you have any missed keystrokes? How about the display? Any bugs? etc.


Best regards,

Bill

#3

This is a good sign. Actually the 17Bii+ could easily be reshaped into an Hp42s+ also. And since it has long variable names and as such, never allowed by the NCEES, toss in a USB serial port as well (and units conversions while your at it, and you can drop the IR). I'd buy a couple if the keyboard quality is there.

#4

Ron Ross wrote:

Quote:
....a good sign. Actually the 17Bii+ could easily
be reshaped into an Hp42s+ also. And since it has long variable names and as such, never allowed by the NCEES, toss in a USB serial port as well (and units conversions while your at it, and you can drop the IR). I'd buy a couple if the keyboard quality is there.

Perhaps. USB unlikely w/chips this low cost. The USB core & I/O drivers alone may take much more chip area than the little 6502-compatible CPU core + registers. Could double or triple price of chip. +5V serial easier, more generic.

HP lists the 17Bii+ as having an '8502' CPU, same as 33S.
(I think this refers to a broad category of newer 65C02s incl. the Sunplus microcontrollers.)

The odd man out is the new-format HP10Bii. It uses an Hitachi H8 CPU, which is a pretty capable little engine.
This calc may well have come down a different evolutionary tree than the Kinpo stuff.

I wonder if the 17Bii+ is running an emulation layer on top of the 6502-compatible CPU, or if they've rewritten the 17Bii+ code a la the 32S (Saturn) vs new 33S.

Rewrites always include bugs. Emulation is much better: any screwups in emulation layer often effect multiple parts of emulated firmware, making these bugs easier to find early. This does not overrule problems in I/O escape layers but if emulated the calculations should come out identical to Saturn 17BII.

BTW, has anyone compared answers btwn orig HP10B (Saturn) and the newer-style 10Bii (H8 CPU)?? Esp interesting would be TVM use of solver...

Bill Wiese
San Jose

#5

Is there a simple way to test a 17bii+ to see if it has this feature (somthing that you can do in a couple of minutes in a shop for example!)?

#6

I would suspect that the die size of the CPU chip is "pad limited". The number of bonding pads to the outside world determine the minimum chip size. In a modern semiconductor process I would suspect that you could toss in several USB cores, etc in the leftover space.

#7

Try entering the following equation into the Solver:

L(Z:X)+G(Z)+Y=0

Entering a value for X and solving for Y returns -2*X, i.e.

X=1, Y=-2
X=2, Y=-4
X=3, Y=-6

etc.

#8

David,

For many simple designs w/lots of I/O that is true, design is pad limited. Sometimes getting rid of pins instead of functions can indeed lower chip price substantially.

However, the complexity of a USB core w/buffers is roughly on order of the 65C02 CPU core + RAM. The output line drivers can take quite a bit of chip area - I saw the area budget for a .50u consumer product chip (circa 1999-2000) and for the whole USB subsystem it was 25% chip area w/ about 1/3 of that for USB line drivers. Because of layout issues, if we _could_ have removed that we coulda saved some nice die area.

Many co's that do not have good mixed signal processes for their lower end chips have ICs that have the USB protocol engine but require external USB driver chip.

Bill Wiese
San Jose

#9

Looks like I'll have to budget some money from my next paycheck and check out the "new" new 17BII+. :)

In the mean time, I've been concentrating on more on the algebraic math on the 49G+.



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