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Messages - Lionel Debroux

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16
Computer Usage and Setup Help / Re: TI Connect being stupid (again)...
« on: November 11, 2013, 03:46:37 pm »
Quote
What? I never needed to install a driver.
Well, for the purposes of communicating with a device in vendor-specific class, you did :)
If you didn't install the filter driver, then you must have erased TI's driver, otherwise you'd need the filter driver.

Quote
Is this the same driver gCn uses?
AFAIK, the gCn client doesn't require libticables to be installed, so I'd say no. Plus one of the gCn bridges doesn't need a driver because it uses HID class (like the HP Prime). The limited speed of HID isn't a problem for a gCn bridge, but it is a significant problem for handling large amounts of data on a Prime.

17
Computer Usage and Setup Help / Re: TI Connect being stupid (again)...
« on: November 11, 2013, 03:41:02 pm »
Yeah, without admin privileges, you're toast.
It's not so different on Linux, that said - one needs to be root for a short time as well, either for installing a package (when there's a suitable one for the distro and it's not outdated), or adding a udev file which triggers read+write access to non-root users.

18
Computer Usage and Setup Help / Re: TI Connect being stupid (again)...
« on: November 11, 2013, 03:21:26 pm »
Getting TILP from http://ourl.ca/4010/360344 would be even better :)
ClrDraw: as indicated by the README, you'll have to follow a manual procedure and install a "filter driver" for TILP to work. That sucks from a user's POV, but the culprit is a fundamental Windows limitation. Windows hates having more than one driver for a given piece of hardware. Having to install such workarounds is not a problem of TILP itself.

19
General Calculator Help / Re: Installing CAS on TI-Nspire CX Non-CAS
« on: November 11, 2013, 02:08:32 pm »
You can do that on other places, but not on Omnimaga ;)

20
HP Prime / Re: libhpcalcs: a toolkit for communicating with Prime calcs...
« on: November 10, 2013, 04:18:52 pm »
I have fixed several bugs reported on TI-Planet, and performed large changes on error codes, which I had started before the bug reports. The code base doesn't seem to be completely broken, according to critor's tests (upwards propagation of errors was already mostly done).
For now, until further testing, changes were pushed to a new "master2" branch. You need to pull and explicitly checkout the branch to be able to test the new changes.

New Windows binaries + source tarball (hopefully) attached.

Thanks in advance ;)

[EDIT: removing extraneous file, I attached it twice]

21
HP Prime / Re: libhpcalcs: a toolkit for communicating with Prime calcs...
« on: November 10, 2013, 04:10:37 am »
Definitely, like libti*, libhpcalcs aims at being a backend for both CLI programs and GUI programs.

http://desowin.org/usbpcap/tour.html gives some information about capturing USB packets.

22
HP Prime / Re: libhpcalcs: a toolkit for communicating with Prime calcs...
« on: November 10, 2013, 01:57:17 am »
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I will probably try to test it when I have some time, providing that it isn't command-line based,
test_hpcalcs is terminal-based, though interactive.
There's mild point in spending time developing a GUI for some code backend nobody cares about in the first place - and so far, hardly anybody cares about libhpcalcs: no reply on TI-Planet (where I posted a week ago), no reply on Cemetech, only your reply here, and a single beta-tester (besides critor) so far.

Quote
isn't a major PITA to install and doesn't require 2000 dependencies
Well, I provided ready-made Windows binaries, just unzip the ZIP file attached to my previous post ;)
libpng needs to be added as a dependency at some point... but only if the program has actual users. For now, that's not a given.

23
HP Prime / libhpcalcs: a toolkit for communicating with Prime calcs...
« on: November 09, 2013, 04:20:26 pm »
See the end of the post for download links.

Over the past few weeks, as mentioned at http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=55&t=13240 and http://ourl.ca/19769 , I've been working on a toolkit for communicating with HP Prime calculators, strongly inspired by libti* for TI calculators, and unsurprisingly dubbed libhpcalcs. It can be downloaded from https://github.com/debrouxl/hplp .
Thanks to critor's USB dumps and tests (EDIT: and later, other persons' tests), we believe the code now works well enough for being beta-tested used by a wider public (on Windows, Linux and MacOS X) :)
While neither critor, nor I, believe that anything can make a significant dent into TI's market share because TI is too entrenched and has lobbying power, we're nevertheless trying to do something with the Prime... as it's clear that if nobody bothers, the Prime won't stand a chance to get widely used (chicken-and-egg problem).


"Toolkit for communicating with HP calculators" means that it's a library backend for people to build GUIs on top of it, but libhpcalcs itself is a GUI-less library, and its terminal-based test program is currently the only UI for using libhpcalcs...

Excerpt from the README about the library's current capabilities:
Quote
The code base does:
* support communication with a single Prime calculator connected to the computer. The communication is known to work with the "SDKV0.30" firmware version from mid-August 2013, but might not work with other older or newer versions, if HP performs backwards-incompatible changes in the protocol (like TI does);
* implement six operations (without _known_ bugs): ready check, get calculator information, receive screenshot, send file, receive file, receive backup, set date and time;
* provide a terminal-based UI: the test program "test_hpcalcs".

The code base doesn't:
* perform color conversion on PNG screenshots (libhpcalcs should depend on libpng to uncompress the files, and recompress them after mangling);
* provide a way to select one of multiple HP calculators (probing USB devices);
* provide a user-friendly GUI for the above, but a GUI can definitely build upon the library easily enough;
* implement _proper_ conversion from UTF-16 LE to other charsets on its own: that's a task for libicu, Qt or other libraries;

What's next ?
* first of all, making sure that people are interested in the work in the first place. I'm clearly not going to keep spending most of my free time (as I did over the past week) on something people do not find useful ! [EDIT a couple weeks later: seems that some people are interested :)]
* fixing bugs which are bound to be reported, none are known right now but there certainly are some :)
* implementing several extra features from the TODO list embedded into the README, starting with probing devices;
* implementing a GUI for the program (with Qt, which has become the main choice for a portable, good-looking, fast UI toolkit and software abstraction layer)... but I don't plan on doing it by myself, although I'll obviously gladly support anyone trying to do so.
* implementing 39gII support ?
* certainly more... again, iff people are interested.


Go forth and test, thanks in advance ;)


Development source code: https://github.com/debrouxl/hplp (master branch is stable, master2 contains changes for testing, which may be rewritten before integration to master).
Ready-made install script: https://raw.github.com/debrouxl/hplp/master/install_hplp.sh . Unless your distro packages hidapi (Debian and derivatives do not), you'll have to compile it yourself (autotools-based program, so configure && make && sudo make install).
Latest Windows binaries + source tarball: http://tiplanet.org/beta/libhpcalcs-0.0.1-package.zip .

Also, I'm looking for 39gII users who can tolerate command-line tools, for providing me USB dumps (usbpcap) from their Windows computers when running the HP Connectivity Kit, the way critor did for the Prime.

[latest EDIT: 2013/11/16]

24
Other Calculators / Re: TI 89 not archiving
« on: November 09, 2013, 09:27:52 am »
If you want to be able to put data files 0-9 in Flash memory, then use tiosmod+amspatch, transfer the patched AMS 2.09 (due to a different number of sectors for AMS, you should lose all of your archive contents), transfer data files 0-9 and archive them, transfer assembly programs and archive them. That way, only data file 10 will stay in RAM.

25
Other Calculators / Re: TI 89 not archiving
« on: November 09, 2013, 09:10:18 am »
After a quick investigation (less than 10 minutes, writing this post took me longer), it turns out that David's guess above was fully correct:
Quote
The main issue is that the TIOS cannot find 32Kb of contiguous archive memory.
There's no memory corruption at all, your calculator is simply out of memory for storing the data which you want to store, which is made of large blocks, leaving a large unusable slack at the end of each 64 KB sector...

Even my tiosmod+amspatch, which shrinks AMS 2.08 & 2.09 for 89 in such a way that users get 64 KB more archive space, wouldn't make it possible for you to store everything you want to store. While it would give you room for one more large file, e.g. data file number 8, you'd still be missing data file number 9. Data file number 10 can definitely be stored in the same sector as the assembly programs.

At least four solutions, three easy and one hard:
* use a V200 (assuming it's supported by the assembly program) or a 89T, only those have enough Flash memory;
* use TIEmu to emulate a V200 or 89T;
* use PedroM, which is far smaller than AMS, and could just work for the purposes of the program you want to use - but of course, no TI-BASIC or FlashApps on PedroM.
* use tiosmod+amspatch to shrink your OS (that's easy, all the more some ready-made patches are provided), then turn your 512 KB of data into a contiguous FlashApp (the hardest part is making TIFS work; the TIFS Sierra toolchain doesn't depend on Microsoft's proprietary incompatible so-called Java, but someone needs to give you the procedure for building a FlashApp through the set of command-line tools) + modify the assembly program(s) (IIRC, the set is open source) in such a way that it reads / they read from the FlashApp instead of reading from scattered files. Right, that's no much fun.

If you can stand the loss of any language other than English, you should use tiosmod+amspatch anyway: it makes the OS faster (and for you, smaller).

26
TI-Nspire / Re: Minecraft 2D for TI-Nspire
« on: November 06, 2013, 01:08:12 pm »
Quote
but in 3.6, there may be advanced images APIs
But Jens will still need a fallback option, as Minecraft 2D rightfully strives at being portable across versions of the Nspire OS.

27
News / Re: Casio PRIZM OS 2.00 released
« on: November 06, 2013, 02:18:33 am »
Such a large latency in drawing can only be intentional.

28
News / Re: Put both Ndless and OS 3.6 in your TI-Nspire
« on: November 03, 2013, 09:35:20 am »
Well, it's a bit hard to market a calculator outside the summer buying period, especially when one's not the market leader. And it's one of the reasons the Prime is unlikely to make a significant dent into TI's market share.

The colorization of a program done for the 39gII by someone else, or a shitty game with a high-profile name (one of his usual tricks), spammed to the few places he's not banned from yet, are hardly mention-worthy; his recent attack with death wishes will only extend the period of time the rules about him stay that way in the TI community.

29
News / Re: Put both Ndless and OS 3.6 in your TI-Nspire
« on: November 03, 2013, 04:01:45 am »
The Prime is unlikely to ever become real mainstream, at least in the USA and several key countries, as TI is far too entrenched in the education market and has far too much lobbying power. However, there's a chicken-and-egg problem: if we, as a user and programmer community, don't show the Prime enough love until TI releases a new model (*), the Prime will get much less of a chance to become mainstream at all. We need to spend some time on it, even if we don't think the Prime will be a major hit in the end :)


(*) we already heard about a "CX Premium" as a side effect of a TI webinar.
Anyway, history shows that TI releases new models every 2-3 years: the V200 hit the market in 2002, the 89T in 2004, the Nspire Clickpad in 2007 (should have been 2006 with the CAS+, but it was too sub-par), the Nspire Touchpad (minor evolution) in 2010, the Nspire CX (major evolution) in H1 2011, the 84+CSE (at the low end) in H1 2013... and we're now well in Q4 2013. The "CX Premium" clearly wasn't targeted at the 2013-2014 school season (unlike the Prime, which missed the target), but assuming TI's release cycle remains similar, the next higher-end TI calculator is unlikely to hit the market later than Q4 2014 - H1 2015, ahead of time for the 2015-2016 school season.

30
News / Re: First patch of the HP-Prime firmware
« on: November 02, 2013, 05:16:15 pm »
Quote
Btw, does the transfer of unnoficial patches only work in "HPLP" or will it work with the official connectivity kit too?
"HPLP" does not implement the Mass Storage Device-based protocol used for reflashing the calculator (only the HID-based protocol for transferring regular files), so for now, it won't transfer either official or unofficial firmware at all :)

Don't worry, fixing bugs or adding a translucency to BLIT commands requires a depth of reverse-engineering that we're very far from having on the Prime yet.

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