One day I was scrolling through my TI-89 Titanium's catalog and saw the CyclePic command. Its job is to display many images (frames) in quick succession to show an animation. Interestingly, TI did not include a companion wizard to create a sequence of images that could be used by this command. So I decided to make one myself using TI-BASIC.
CycleGen (short for "Cycle Generator") is a giant boilerplate program that "cycles" a variable through a range of values, generates a graph for each keyframe, and exports them to individual picture variables. It's built as a boilerplate rather than a GUI or TUI program because it enables much more flexibility: you can do crazy BASIC things like modifying graphable equations and their visual styles, modifying window variables, doing algebra on a per-frame basis, printing text onto the graph screen at any spot to show current values of variables, and even calling subprograms.
This program is very useful for students (like me) who want to do some extra exploration of how changing certain variables in equations can affect them in a very intuitive way. The TI-89 Titanium is definitely not fast enough to generate 2 or 3 images of graphs in a second (with the built-in AMS), so this is also a lifesaver when looking for a way to "pan" 3D graphs in any way without having to wait for the calculator to leisurely render it again from a different angle. You can also graph cross-sections of 3D graphs by cycling the z variable on a 2D graph. I could go on; it's completely up to the user to harness the extreme power of CycleGen.
So after the program is done running and all the images are saved, you need a way to play them back as an animation, and nobody's fingers are fast enough to use RplcPic fast enough to do it manually
. Before version 2.0 of CycleGen you had to use the AMS's built in instruction called CyclePic to play the animation, but unfortunately it only supports a maximum of 50 frames every time you call it, and you cannot play/pause or scrub in it... so, I went and created a replacement, again in BASIC. CycleView lets you play back as many frames as you want, and you can even use the arrow keys to scrub between individual frames if something catches your eye. It's bundled with CycleGen and is easier to use than CyclePic.
Since the generated data can take up so much space in RAM, you can easily allow the program to use Flash memory if necessary by setting a "flag", which is just a variable that the program checks to behave differently. There are several flags available which shape the behavior of the program (primarily in memory management), and there are also some safeguard high-precedence flags that protect your Flash chip from receiving too many writes. The relatively vast amounts of memory in the TI-89 Titanium are a huge advantage when it comes to this use case, as it often has more than 136KB of RAM freely available plus much more Flash, while one frame usually only takes up 1.5KB.
CycleGen has been in development for a few weeks now, and two versions of it already existed before 2.0, but I felt I had to wait until it was a little more feature-complete to make a post about it.
Check it out at the Cemetech Archives and enjoy the massively extended graphing capabilities of your TI-89/Titanium.
P.S., I'm very proud of the first image above since the original graphs were all generated with CycleGen, replayed with CycleView, and then screenshotted (in frame scrubbing mode) with Titanium-49, my rudimentary TI-89 link port interfacing project.
CycleGen (short for "Cycle Generator") is a giant boilerplate program that "cycles" a variable through a range of values, generates a graph for each keyframe, and exports them to individual picture variables. It's built as a boilerplate rather than a GUI or TUI program because it enables much more flexibility: you can do crazy BASIC things like modifying graphable equations and their visual styles, modifying window variables, doing algebra on a per-frame basis, printing text onto the graph screen at any spot to show current values of variables, and even calling subprograms.
This program is very useful for students (like me) who want to do some extra exploration of how changing certain variables in equations can affect them in a very intuitive way. The TI-89 Titanium is definitely not fast enough to generate 2 or 3 images of graphs in a second (with the built-in AMS), so this is also a lifesaver when looking for a way to "pan" 3D graphs in any way without having to wait for the calculator to leisurely render it again from a different angle. You can also graph cross-sections of 3D graphs by cycling the z variable on a 2D graph. I could go on; it's completely up to the user to harness the extreme power of CycleGen.
So after the program is done running and all the images are saved, you need a way to play them back as an animation, and nobody's fingers are fast enough to use RplcPic fast enough to do it manually
. Before version 2.0 of CycleGen you had to use the AMS's built in instruction called CyclePic to play the animation, but unfortunately it only supports a maximum of 50 frames every time you call it, and you cannot play/pause or scrub in it... so, I went and created a replacement, again in BASIC. CycleView lets you play back as many frames as you want, and you can even use the arrow keys to scrub between individual frames if something catches your eye. It's bundled with CycleGen and is easier to use than CyclePic.
Since the generated data can take up so much space in RAM, you can easily allow the program to use Flash memory if necessary by setting a "flag", which is just a variable that the program checks to behave differently. There are several flags available which shape the behavior of the program (primarily in memory management), and there are also some safeguard high-precedence flags that protect your Flash chip from receiving too many writes. The relatively vast amounts of memory in the TI-89 Titanium are a huge advantage when it comes to this use case, as it often has more than 136KB of RAM freely available plus much more Flash, while one frame usually only takes up 1.5KB.
CycleGen has been in development for a few weeks now, and two versions of it already existed before 2.0, but I felt I had to wait until it was a little more feature-complete to make a post about it.
Check it out at the Cemetech Archives and enjoy the massively extended graphing capabilities of your TI-89/Titanium.
P.S., I'm very proud of the first image above since the original graphs were all generated with CycleGen, replayed with CycleView, and then screenshotted (in frame scrubbing mode) with Titanium-49, my rudimentary TI-89 link port interfacing project.
