epsilon

I've engaged in debates on HN about the definition of "open source" in the past, so there might be some disagreement about the meaning of the title. I've settled on using "OSI open source" to avoid this, since those discussions are uniformly tiring and unproductive. That said, I agree with parent: the repo specifically has a section regarding copyright and it simply says that all rights are reserved[0]. This is proprietary software, disallowing copying, distribution, and derivative works. It's weird, since even cloning the repo appears to be a violation of their stated terms, though they supply instructions for building the software yourself that of course requires copying the code to your machine first[1]. Copyright is weird. [0]: https://github.com/numworks/epsilon#copyright [1]: https://www.numworks.com/resources/engineering/software/b

They still are open source [1]. If I had to guess, the reason they locked the bootloader is the same reason they removed the symbolic math functionality (which is re-added in Omega [2]), test accreditation. They want to create a calculator to provide a good and viable alternative to TI. They can only do that if their calculator is allowed on tests like the ACT, SAT, etc. [1]: https://github.com/numworks/epsilon [2]: https://getomega.dev/

That is beautiful. I wish the company great success. > Epsilon is a high-performance graphing calculator operating system. > It includes eight apps that cover the high school mathematics curriculum. https://www.numworks.com/resources/engineering/software/ https://github.com/numworks/epsilon Looks like this single codebase is used to build for the calculator device, and all targets for the simulator: Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, and the web. > NumWorks Epsilon is released under a CC BY-NC-SA License. Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode

I also wanted to point to Numworks as an alternative calculator. It uses a 216 MHz ARMv7-M Cortex-M7 microcontroller and is almost open-source (both the hardware and the software, called Epsilon). https://www.numworks.com/resources/engineering/ There was (and probably still is) a Numworks pet peeve of mine, though. As far as I understand, on many kinds of calculations (e.g., calculating a power of a number, or a derivative at a point) the Numworks software does an artificial "rounding" step with the purpose of presenting "nicer" results to high-schoolers in trivial cases. See https://github.com/numworks/epsilon/pull/1376 and https://github.com/numworks/epsilon/issues/1373 . It seems like the Numworks dudes have no concept of the accumulation of rounding errors :( ? On top of removing precision intentionally being a weird choice, the imple

I think releasing the source code and open-source are 2 different things. Paul is an amazing guy, I absolutely cannot argue - he is super cool. Open-source means I have the license to use it in ways that are defined in an agreement outlined in the specific open source license (say MIT license). Paul provides a bunch of stuff for their users, but I cannot copy his designs and bootloader (which is closed) in a commercial project without taking on liability. The problem is a philosophical one as well - Half-open or "visible source" projects exploit benefits of the open-source community (engagement, contributions, feedback, etc.) without giving anything back to the community (license to reproduce freely). I have a problem with this. Either make something completely closed source (totally fine) or make it completely open source. Another exampl

You may want to check out: The whole calculator running in a browser, thanks to emscripten : https://www.numworks.com/simulator/ An interactive PCB viewer, in the browser again : https://www.numworks.com/resources/engineering/hardware/elec... Full schematics https://www.numworks.com/resources/engineering/hardware/elec... And of course the whole source code to the operating system, https://github.com/numworks/epsilon

>I'm not sure how free this license is. There is an ongoing discussion about what license to use for what part of the project, and what is the rational behind such and such choice. See this Github issue: https://github.com/numworks/epsilon/issues/38

I very much like the idea of this calculator, particularly since it has a python implementation. However, there are a couple of caveats - it uses binary arithmetic, though since release it seems they've improved the accuracy, and also I'm not sure how free this license is[1]. For something that isn't open-source, but uses RPN and has quad-precision binary-encoded decimal precision the DM42 looks really nice[2]. [1] https://github.com/numworks/epsilon/blob/master/LICENSE [2] https://www.swissmicros.com/dm42.php

This calculator doesn't seem to support RPN though: https://github.com/numworks/epsilon/issues/35 Too bad. There's always https://www.swissmicros.com/

This is a bug that's being currently worked on. See https://github.com/numworks/epsilon/issues/6

The numworks code can be found here: https://github.com/numworks/epsilon.git The hardware used is described extensively on their website: https://www.numworks.com/resources/engineering/hardware/ From their website: https://www.numworks.com/why/ "NumWorks is the first open graphing calculator: all our engineering effort is made available online under a Creative Commons license. Each device can be completely customized, and the community can build improvements that will be collectively shared in software updates. All our blueprints and 3D plans are public. Devices can be easily repaired, and using some off-the-shelf electronic components you can even try to build your own 3D printed calculator. "