With TI's annual Teachers Teaching Technology (T^3) conference coming up next week, it's no big surprise that TI has unveiled two new TI-Nspire CX-related products. The first is TI-Nspire OS 4.2, a new OS for the TI-Nspire family of handhelds that adds a few new math and science features; the second is a new activity in TI's partnership with NASA entitled "Fuel for the Fire". First, the major new features that TI's email to teachers mentions for the TI-Nspire OS 4.2:

• Inequality graphing: for example, you can now graph equations like x^2 + y^2 < 25 (a filled circle, including the exclusive bound indicated by a dashed line)
  
• Sliders on graphs: Allows students to change values on a graph with a slider (for example, the radius r in the equation above could have its value set by a slider). This makes it easier to explore families of functions.
  
• Pop-up context menus that provide more tools while typing equations.
  
• "Prepare all the handhelds for tests from one location": This appears to let teachers set every connected handheld with an attached wireless module to the same screen, or to wirelessly put calculators into test mode.

A video demoing the new features is available on YouTube, and will no doubt be shown in the opening session at T^3 next week. A more detailed list of the new features is available as well. In addition, we expect that TI will introduce a new TI-Nspire OS soon with features similar to the new Send() and Get() commands added to TI-OS 5.1.5, and based on recent emails from TI, a new STEM tool to experiment with calculators and DIY electronics will be demonstrated at the conference that uses this functionality.

The "Fuel for the Fire" activity for the TI-Nspire CX, part of mISSion imaginaTIon, lets students gain insight into a challenging math concept in the context of designing fuel tanks for a rocket. Students can explore "rate of change" in the context of rocket science as they work to design fuel tanks equipped for space. They play the role of a Fuel Systems Engineer designing a fuel tank, morphing a cylinder into different shapes to see how the shape of a tank affects the rate at which it can be filled. The activity will be available on TI's website today.

Er, you know... in fact, they already did...
You probably haven't read https://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=17963 (in French), but it's explicitly written in the first post of the derived https://codewalr.us/index.php?topic=1119.0 (in English). It's one of the first things that were noticed two days ago, even before TI's chronically unreliable changelog was found by the community.
You should widen your reading horizon

Also, like TI, you neglected to mention that:
* TI raised the anti-downgrade protection to forbid going back to even the previous OS version, in case of a catastrophic bug (as already occurred in the past) or for other purposes;
* TI prevented the hole used by Ndless 4.0 from working.

Your writing on TI's new activity is good, but your writing on OS 4.2 isn't oriented enough towards community developers and users

FTFY.

Thank you so much for that helpful addition! In the future, Cemetech's many members would no doubt benefit from a topic showing off those discoveries. Thanks in advance for doing that next time.

Nice write up Kerm! Sounds like TI is really focusing efforts on the Nspire recently.


Ah, that's cool to hear. I wonder if there will be more information on these new commands, as it looks a lot like they are making the CE a sort of little brother counterpart to the Nspire. Probably just because of the hardware similarities

Thank you! Actually, in the past we've seen the same push for a new OS + a major new activity right before T^3, so I wouldn't take it as too much of an indication that they're prioritizing new things for the TI-Nspire in general.

Yes, there will be new information on these commands, including how they'll be used more immediately (specifically with that STEM tool) and how we might be able to appropriate them for our own hardware projects. I actually don't know what the answer to the latter part is yet, but for the sake of ArTICL (and CALCnet?), I definitely hope I find out soon.

*bump* The Fuel for the Fire activity is now available for download: https://education.ti.com/html/Nasa/activities.shtml

Regarding the new OS 4.2 Nspire-Lua APIs mentioned in the updated documentation, mainly the ASI (Asynchronous Serial Interface), I've hooked up an Arduino Uno to my computer and quickly wrote a script on TINCS using those APIs to interact with it a bit, and anyway, it works:





Jim Bauwens' tests show that the handheld isn't as happy, though (but doesn't blatantly say that the plugged in peripheral isn't compatible either, as it's been the cases before...), so we'll know more about compatibility during the T3 conference...

What does it use as a serial port, the pins in the docking port? Regardless, that's pretty interesting.

It's using the USB port

Ah, I see, then I guess I missed the API that you're talking about. Lua has APIs to interface with USB devices now? Do you have a link to the API documentation about these functions (or shall I just check the manual)?

The Lua documentation now contains a section 'ASI', which is the Lua equalivent of the Get and Send commands. It allows you to talk using a serial interface with certain USB CDC devices. Connecting external peripherals and interacting with Lua is easier than ever