Hello, I created a wireless link between two calculators and was able to have wireless chat. I was only able to find one other tutorial on the internet located here: http://people.ece.cornell.edu/land/courses/ece4760/FinalProjects/s2011/mdb236_wpb35/mdb236_wpb35/TI%20Calculator%20Wireless%20Chat.htm I thought there could be an easier and simpler way to this, so I used two arduino's and two xbee's. To keep things cheap I made my own arduino for about $10 plus the $20 for the xbee. The total was around $60, but you could opt for a cheaper radio, however the xbee's are really simple to use.

There is a great guide on the on how the calculator's link port works here: http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/247/24750.html Be sure to read hardware.html. This was extremely helpful because I am emulating the ti protocol. All I did was port the code from the guide to the arduino language, so there may be some bugs, or better ways to write it. Also there is no timeout or error check part in the code so you will have to manually reset the microcontroller if there is an error in transmission.

Pictures are below and my code is available at https://github.com/mitch8/wirelessTI-84

Thanks,
Mitch

Great job, Mitch! Welcome to Cemetech, by the way; please Introduce Yourself. The tutorial you linked does indeed have some excellent information, which led me to create my Arduino-TI linking routines (did those help you here?). While we're talking about wireless calculator linking, there have been many long-suffering projects to create wireless CALCnet implementations using Xbees; would you be interested in perhaps taking a crack at that?

*bump* I just wanted to make sure we didn't lose you here; I'm particularly interested in seeing if you might want to expand this to CALCnet/gCn somehow.

Hi, sorry about the late reply but unfortunately I have been very busy lately and will be for a couple months, so I will be unable to work on my projects for a while.

How does the CALCnet work? Maybe it could be a small programming change, otherwise it might take some time.

Totally understandable, good luck on your work.

The main difference is that instead of being point-to-point, it's a multipoint protocol. Calculators can send directed packets intended for one other destination, or broadcast packets intended for all other destinations. Such a system would require making a lot of XBees talk amongst themselves. There's a full whitepaper on the CALCnet protocol:
http://www.cemetech.net/programs/index.php?mode=file&id=511

Interesting, I'll have to try out CALCnet on my calculator. Unfortunately I have no idea how to set up XBee mesh networks or have any CALCnet experience so I'm probably not the right guy to work on this. Good luck trying to get it to work!

Mitch

Thanks anyway; if you happen to stop by every once in a while I will probably pick your brain about XBee. We have quite a few other users here who have poked at the idea of wireless CALCnet, but none of them have quite gotten as far as a working prototype.