Casio fx Graphing Calculators Get a TCP/IP Stack — and IRC Chat Client — Courtesy of fxIP
Making use of the serial port, this port of Adam Dunkel's uIP connects Casio fx-9750/fx-9860 calculators to IRC.
Developers Tobias Mädel and Tobias Miner have ported a networking stack to the Casio fx-9750/fx-9860, bringing the devices online — and even adding an IRC client to prove their capabilities.
"fxIP is a port of [Adam Dunkels'] uIP 1.0 to Casio fx-9750/fx-9860 calculators," Mädel explains of the open source project. "It (currently) requires calculators with a SuperH SH4a CPU, [as it] needs quite a bit of SRAM."
"fxIP connects to IP networks via SLIP encapsulation over the 3-pin 2.5mm 5V serial port/UART. By default, it connects to irc.libera.chat (without SSL)."
Two of Casio's most popular graphic calculators, the fx-9750 and fx-9860 feature single-color dot-matrix displays and a CPU just about powerful enough to run surprisingly complex user-provided code — from games to, as the two developers have proven, a full networking stack.
With no integrated Wi-Fi connectivity, though, it's more a proof-of-concept: The calculators connect to a network through a host device using a built-in serial port - meaning that if you're using your fx-family calculator to chat on IRC, you're almost certainly sat next to a more powerful computer capable of doing the same.
The source code and installation instructions are published on GitHub under an unspecified open source license.
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