[Staff] TIWiFiModem: Take your TI-83 Plus online

[benryves]

Ever since I first saw Telnet83+ I was intrigued with the idea of taking a calculator online, but never had the equipment (dial-up modem, phone line and "graylink" serial cable) to make it all work.

Fortunately you can now get inexpensive WiFi-enabled microcontroller modules and there are several projects that take these and turn them into "modems" for old computers, allowing you to connect them to the modern Internet.

I took one of these projects, RetroWiFiModem, and replaced the code that spoke to a RS-232 serial port with code that spoke to the calculator's native link protocol. The result is the TIWiFiModem.

To go along with the modem project I have also included an updated version of Telnet83+ which contains a few bug fixes and enhancements (and is also a few thousand bytes smaller).

Here's a video demonstration of taking the calculator online:



If you're interested in building one yourself, or downloading the updated Telnet83+, please see the project's Github page.

[tr1p1ea]

I had missed this, amazing work! I will absolutely have to try this out myself.

[benryves]

Cheers, tr1p1ea! It's mostly putting together a few bits and pieces other people had already written, but I'd always wanted to play with getting a calculator online.

[CDI]

I so badly want to use this and hang out in IRC for a bit, just to get a feel for how crazy it would be.