Omnimaga
Calculator Community => TI Calculators => General Calculator Help => Topic started by: apcalc on April 18, 2010, 06:09:29 pm
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Hi. I have a problem with my TI-Nspire memory. I contacted Texas Instruments about this 2 weeks ago and the person who answered my question said they had the same problem with their TI-Nspire, but they did not know the problem. The e-mail said they would contact another department to find an answer, but I have not received a response. My memory status screen shows that 14.1 MB of my memory is being used, but I only have 143 KB in my documents (both screen shots are attached). Does anyone know what causes this problem? If anyone wants to see my response from TI, I can post if here, and if no one knows what causes this, I will contact them again. Thanks!
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hmm...could it maybe be the OS that resides in ram (I think it does that), otherwise sorry I don't know.
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I always noticed on my Nspire sometimes I appear to have a lot of missing memory. I wonder if it's being used by the TI-OS?
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The N-spire OS resides in Ram, nucleus I do not believe has any transitive code although the app side likely does not at all time. but that's irrelevant because that is not a measure of RAM usage that is a measure of "archive" which is used in the N-spire like a disk.
So net result that is a measure of space in file system not RAM.
Additionally the OS is not TI-OS its Nucleus OS. TI used an outside OS and just wrote apps that nucleus runs. (using a dll like system)
We are no longer in the realm of processor, screen/keyboard, and memory and into the world of kernel, device drivers and file system.
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Well it's understandable that people would think of the Nspire as a calculator considering it was released for use in classes like calculator mostly. You have to understand that. It's more of a computer but no need to bash people who call it a calculator or make them feel bad, especially when you are new to the forums (it could make people get a bad opinion of you since we do not condone rudeness here). Plus, the older TI calcs are almost computers now anyway. You can do more than the 4 operations, you can play games and even the TI-BASIC language, despite not being designed for games exclusively, still give us game functions. They can even be turned totally into computers if someone makes a custom OS.
I did not know TI used someone else's OS (Nucleus) for the TI-Nspire, though. I was sure it was their own x.x. Not only they try to hinder us with DMCA notices and can't fix their old calc OSes bugs, but now they can't even write their own OS for the Nspire x.x
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Could there be something really large in the Ans variable? Could that happen on the Nspire?
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I think this is happens on all calculators. All the examples in various languages, and the OS, take up ROM space.
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In the screenie from the post, the "memory" shown on the Nspire is the addition of RAM+ROM (I have no idea why they added them together, but never mind). A large part of memory (both ROM and RAM) is used by the Nspire OS. So if you want more free memory, you can install a smaller (and thus older) OS.
On the french TI-Bank forum, someone managed to remove the boot2 code from the OS upgrade file and to send this alleged version of the OS to the calc, resulting in more free memory being available. If anyone is interested in this, I can provide more details and links.
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In the screenie from the post, the "memory" shown on the Nspire is the addition of RAM+ROM (I have no idea why they added them together, but never mind).
I'm not sure that you are looking at the memory hierarchy the right way although this seems to make sense because of how TI has done there previous calculators but none the less the N-spire is a huge departure from previous calculators as TI advertises it's more like a computer and that goes for both inside and out.
The N-spire believe it or not has a boot strap,a kernel, hardware abstraction, and the works. In fact I'm not even sure that it is single core any more (it may have multiple processors) but I digress.
I do not have time to post a full description of how the N-spire works from a hard where stand point but I will say that there is 32MB of flash memory (used like a hard disk) and you are seeing that minus the partitioning and file system overhead. (likely FAT)
To understand fully the gigantic departure from TI's norms you can compare a cell phone to a desktop computer. the N-spire is the OS it runs is called Nucleus RTOS.
heres the wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleus_RTOS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleus_RTOS)
and here's a useful page of features http://www.mentor.com/products/embedded_software/nucleus_rtos/ (http://www.mentor.com/products/embedded_software/nucleus_rtos/)
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Dont you mean 13.7MB?
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you are using the n-spire cas not the n-spire
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both the Nspire and CAS got 32 MB of RAM and 32 of archive (ask ExtendeD, Calc84maniac or BrandonW), but the OS takes so much that you will never even get close to have that much free memory available.
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I did not know TI used someone else's OS (Nucleus) for the TI-Nspire, though. I was sure it was their own x.x. Not only they try to hinder us with DMCA notices and can't fix their old calc OSes bugs, but now they can't even write their own OS for the Nspire x.x
nope they not only use someone else's OS they also use:
an open source project for their encryption (openSSL)
another open source project for their compression of tns files (zlib)
a third for xml parsing (eXpat)
and their gui concepts are based on Fathom Dynamic Data. (at least that is the impression i get)
goto settings->handheld status->about and it tells you all this stuff
I personally think its a gift for them to be using libraries we can see the source code of because it can give us a better understanding of how the calculator works and how to crack it. because we know what has to be in the OS so we don't have to guess how they did things.
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Yeah I agree with that. I just got surprised that they did not even create their own stuff x.x. On top of that they make us pay for the software that uses someone else's stuff x.x. Oh well, to me what matters the most is Ndless 2.0 so I can finally use Ndless without having to downgrade :P
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agreed I haven't really used Ndless because my programs exploit a lot of the changes in behavior since OS 1.4 in order to work. little things that make me able to do more with less in N-spire basic.
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Oh yah I've neglected to mention that nucleus is not an OS like TI OS it's more like the lynx kernel except with out the command line the only way to interface to nucleus directly is through compiled binary programs. So TI did write everything we see and all the math functions. just not the stuff that makes everything work. nucleus is a kernel only to the best of my knowledge.
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scratch that it's a kernel and api's meaning graphic display libraries (we should try to find though for Ndless and complicated drivers for delayed write i/o, network protocols, USB and all that) We have really got to find thous libraries for ndless because they will open ended for development, fast as a bat out of hell and already there
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OOoh I see now, thanks for clearing that up.
However you may want to use the (http://www.omnimaga.org/Themes/omnimaga4/images/english/modify.gif) button more since double posting within 6 hours is not allowed
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sorry about that. not used to the ability to modify posts often forget that i can do that.
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No problem, just be careful since on some other boards they disallow it completly and some people can see it as spam