We've enjoyed a day and a half of TI Education's T^3 2015 conference in Fort Worth, TX, and as we head into a sunny, warm afternoon of sessions, I wanted to briefly update you on what we've been exploring and experiencing at the conference. We also want to wish you a very happy Pi Day. Some are calling this an "ultimate" Pi Day, as the year 2015 gives us the (US-formatted) date 3/14/15. At 9:26:53am, TI hosted a celebration with pie and coffee, well-attended by the conference attendees. What are you doing to celebrate this Pi day? We hope that your celebrations involve pi recitations and certainly some delicious pie.

Some updates from T^3 2015:

• As announced during yesterday's opening session, TI's popular STEM Behind Hollywood initiative (of which we have made complete TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition ports will now be joined by STEM Behind Health. These new Lua activities will show how math, science, and engineering are involved in health and healthcare. The first activity released is Type 1 Diabetes: Managing a Critical Ratio, which challenges students using the TI-Nspire CX to explore ratios and proportionality, biological control mechanisms, and more.
  
• We are excited to continue promoting graphing calculator programming as a perfect way to get students involved in STEM. I've enjoyed talking to a number of teachers this year that have integrated TI-BASIC programming into their math and science curricula or are considering doing so, and we'll likely have some exciting news to share around graphing calculator programming in schools in the near future. I also attended an excellent talk by the enthusiastic John Isaacs, a constant proponent of my programming book, on introductory TI-BASIC programming
  
• I spoke this morning about graphing calculator programming in the classroom, primarily to math and science teachers. You can download my T^3 2015 presentation, and if you're interested in buying Programming the TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus or Using the TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus today, you can get 41% off both books with code "ctwt3ic".
  
• At the T^3 2015 reception last night, there was much Texas line-dancing in celebration both of our host state and Texas Instruments' heritage. Math and science educators and engineers are enthusiastic and skilled at line dancing, it turns out! There were also delicious hors d'oeuvres and costumed photography fun.
  
• At long last, DrDnar and I both had the opportunity to try out the TI-84 Plus CE in a session taught by John LaMaster. We're not posting official impressions yet, as we haven't had enough time to fairly evaluate the device, but it looks like the screen speed in particular has been greatly improved by 2.6x or more thanks to the new memory-mapped LCD and ez80 processor, while math operations are roughly 15-20% faster. We also got to see some of the features of the new TI Connect CE and TI-SmartView in action.
  
• Finally, we have had the pleasant opportunity to talk to a lot of TI engineers and staff here at the conference, and it's great to see the people who make TI's calculators possible interacting with their target audience.

Once again, happy Pi day, and we can't wait to bring you news on the rest of the conference tomorrow!

Left to right: Yours truly with the TI-84+CE; running an ez80 ASM program on the TI-84+CE; exploring TI-BASIC with John Isaacs; Texas line-dancing; a Texas sunrise; Pi Day pie from TI. Bonus points for finding the zombie from Zombie Apocalypse Parts 1 and 2 in the photos.

I hope you'll be able to go into some detail about what you and the engineers talked about. I can only imagine you brought up the big bad list of bugs

Which is fairly disappointing, as most of us had posted in reaction to critor's benchmarks for the 83PCE (showing ~3x faster scrolling in the home screen, 1.5x-1.7x faster graphing and 1.5x-1.7x operations in the home screen when no data scrolling occurs): an eZ80 processor could do much better than that...
Oh well, it leaves a progression margin for the upcoming TI-83 Extra Color Edition / TI-84 Wonderful Color Edition in, say, 2020

My suspicion is that there weren't many changes made to the math portions of the OS when porting it to the ez80, although that wouldn't explain why it hasn't gotten a significant bump just from the TI-84 Plus CE's pipelining and faster clock speed. Did critor get a chance to determine the actual clock speed of his TI-83 Premium CE at all?

I tested a random points program that runs 1000 iterations of Pt-On(randInt(0,264),randInt(0,164),randInt(10,24),randInt(1,3)) with a window of X=[0,264] and Y=[0,164]. It ran in 77 seconds on my TI-84 Plus CSE, and 62 seconds on a TI-84 Plus CE with OS 5.0.0.89.

Lower case is still IY+24h.

I talked to a sales guy from TI. TI doesn't have any rules about when distributors can start selling TI-84+CEs, so they're free to start selling them as soon as they get them. TI doesn't take pre-orders on them, because they leave it up to the distributors to gauge demand. Two distributors told me that the last they heard, TI has the calculators in their Texas warehouse, and should start shipping them this week. In turn, the distributors should be able to start selling them next week, i.e. the last week of March. This is all tentative, of course, and if they don't appear next week, you have nobody to blame but yourself for being disappointed.

Margot Mankus listened to my suggestions (as she listens to suggestion from teachers, too), even though she couldn't provide any feedback to us. I've suggested adding Lua to the OS, and it's something they are willing to consider (just like any suggestion from a teacher), though I recommend against trying to make it Nspire compatible, because I don't see the hardware handling complex Lua like the Nspire can.

I did get confirmation from other people that TI considers their counter-cheating technologies very important. They get flack from teachers when students get things to defeat those, and then they feel like giving us the cold shoulder. Not giving to students ways to defeat the testing LED, PTT, or TestGuard is necessary (if not sufficient) for getting that 2048-bit app signing key. The actual hacking isn't a concern, it's the new of hacks that make teachers and test administrations get antsy.

Yeah, "be nice to us and we might give you a treat in maybe 10 years". That didn't work out for the Nspire, as I outlined in another topic... One excess destructive move from TI, and poof, attacks on the Nspire's weak PTT.

The times, they are a-changing. Different management, different decisions.

This is very much my view as well; I think patience and perhaps some cool demos of exciting ASM programs are the best we can do at this point. Again, please note my post about how TI is a company of people, some of whom support our work, some of whom worry about it.

This is one of the menus in the [MODE][ALPHA][S] Self-Test screen:

Woh, that's definitely different than the TI 83/84+/SE monochrome family. What do the "P"'s and "U"'s represent? Are they just 2 random letters that TI picked or did they pick those for a reason?

Protected / Unprotected?

Certainly Protected / Unprotected, indeed. critor had conjectured that from his tests on the 83PCE prototype.

That's actually identical to the sector protection on the older calculators, with the exception of the additional ninth sector, which doubles the size of the protected sectors from 8*8=64KB to (8*8+1*64)=128KB.

I calculated pi to the 20,000 number. I fear it's to big to post in this, so I won't post it.

That's a great way to celebrate Pi Day! What language and platform did you use for your calculation? Did you write the program yourself?

I released Caterite Attack in the form of a Pi edition, and my friend recited Pi to the 181st digit!

I just used a application that I downloaded off the internet.

More tests, with tr1p1ea's program showing a full-screen image scrolling:


Video: http://gfycat.com/ScholarlyFeminineEeve
(it'd be nice to have a webm bbcode )

A full scroll takes around 4.2 seconds (with USB not plugged in), and according to Runer112, that's like ≈ 35 FPS.

Very cool! I've been at work all day, so I didn't get a chance to run that program that tr1p1ea sent to me. I'm glad we can get such high FPS with full-screen graphics; that suggests that even if they don't relax the lack of port access, we can support programs that use the half-res mode using full-res mode. This will be particularly useful for a TI-84+CE version of Doors CSE, because I'd love to support the STEM Behind Hollywood activities and xLIBC games with no changes.