Owen sent in his cool Touch Screen Hack for his TI 84 Plus Calculator. He is using an Arduino to read in the data from a Nintendo touch screen, the touch data is then sent to the calculator’s serial port so that it can then graph images based on where the screen is being touched. Did I mention that Owen is 16! I am trying to think what I was doing when I was 16, I am thinking something like adjusting the chain on my mountain bike.
“An especially cool thing that I managed to do was to hook my UART code into the calculator’s BASIC programming environment, so that I can send and receive bytes over the serial connection using a BASIC program (the programs that I am using to draw in the youtube video are written in BASIC). That also means that I don’t have to have a computer to write programs that use the serial port, turning the calculator into a sort of pocket universal interface for serial devices. I have written a small assembly program that automatically detects the speed of a serial connection, so you don’t necessarily need to know that piece of information for the device you want the calculator to talk to.”