gingell@aurs01.uucp (Mike Gingell) (06/18/91)
Steve (sclewarne@unix.icaen.uiowa.edu) writes: > Has anyone purchased the EduCalc M.E. card? If so, what does > it have on it and was it worth the $89??? ---------------------------------------------------------------- Steve asks for an email reply, I will send him one but I think the general community might be interested in this report that I found on Compuserve. It was posted by a Jim Weisbein from England. ---------------------------------------------------------------- I just got the Sparcom Mechanical Engineering Reference Card for the HP48SX, and I thought I would share my first impressions of it, even though I haven't had time to check all of it yet. First of all, a warning: this card uses the library number 776 for some of its storage, which is the same number used by Jim Donnelly's Programmer's Toolkit for his TLLIB library - probably the most useful part of the toolkit, which I purchased at the same time as the Sparcom card. This means that the TLLIB tools and the ME reference library can't be used together, so, if you're using the Toolkit in your programs, you will have a problem if you also intend to get the Sparcom card. The Sparcom card contains virtually the same ASCII chart that comes with the toolkit, and its' data browser also appears to have been "lifted" from the toolkit, so I'm particularly surprised that a conflict like this should go to market. The data browser seems slower than the one which HP supplied with its equation solver card, and I miss the high-lighted scrolling display of the latter. Also, the Sparcom card doesn't support switching between two unit systems via flag 60, as does the Equation solver card, and the units on/off does not toggle flag 61 as does the equation solver, so you can't "preload" whether you want units on or off. The units that are provided are a sometimes peculiar mixture of SI and English systems, e.g: the steam tables are in SI units (degrees K, KJ/KG, etc) but densities are listed in slugs/M^3. Another difference from the Equation Solver card is that the library of physical constants cannot be accessed outside of the Sparcom application, unlike the equation solver card's which can. The main menu presents you with 8 choices: ->Constants library Solids and liquids Gases and vapours Thermal properties Fuels and combustion Refrigerants Environmental control Reference formulas You move the little arrow with the arrow keys, then press enter, and will usually be presented with a sub-menu. Menu keys for UP and MAIN are always available, and you can change the font between the 5x7 and 5x9 sizes. To get to the steam tables, I had to make the following choices in order: Gases and vapours Saturated gas props Water, steam properties H2O from .01 to 102_C (choose temp in 2 degree increments...) At this point I was presented with a list of properties (pressure in Bar, density, enthalpy, etc). Scrolling to a property and then hitting Enter will put a tagged value on the stack, with units appended if the units mode has been selected. There's also an option to print, which I haven't tested, and a menu key for a "figure" (a picture of the system I suppose) but I haven't found any pictures to have actually been supplied - even the moments of inertia formulas have no pictures, which is a real disappointment. Also, there's no built in way to interpolate between values, which would have been nice. I found a few bugs right away. The worst is the Densities section under Properties of liquids: all the units (slugs/ft^3) are appended to the number value without the unit underscore separator, so, when you put the value on the stack, you get a string, and then have to edit it to get a valid unit object. The Standard numbers and Moments of inertia sections have algebraic formulas which, when copied to the stack, become strings for some reason. Its too early to say whether I will find myself really using this card, but my overall impression is that it's kind of sluggish to use and was somewhat hastily put together. Nevertheless, there is nothing else like it on the market, as far as I know. I paid $89.95, from Educalc, who shipped it Federal express - it took 2 whole days from California to London. Now that's service. - Jim Weisbin [693] CIS ID 73457,3462@compuserve.com Mike Gingell, Alcatel, Raleigh, NC USA (919) 850-6444 UUCP: ...!mcnc!aurgate!aurfs1!gingell Internet: gingell%aurfs1%aurgate@mcnc.org