I have a problem. When too many things come on my to-do list, I can’t decide what to do next. And then I do nothing. Not good 💩
I have learned something new. I found some discussions about landscape HP42s.
Problems:
- 42s have six soft-keys. They should be somehow aligned with display. But display from “voyager” hardware is too small and can’t be pushed fully to the left.
- Existing voyager displays have only one line. 42 has two. Also annunciators should be displayed.
- Some people think, what landscape calculators are stupid. But fascinating. Personally I love them.
So, I think I can overcome these problems, I’ve found an interesting display, 132×32 pixels (original 42 has 131×16 + annunciators). So it would be enough to display up to 4 lines (e.g. XYZ+annunciators/time || soft-menu + XY + annunciators)
Also, I have found a very interesting OpenRPN project. Hopefully, I could combine some ideas from it.
Original 42 has 37 buttons. SwissMicros has +6 soft keys. Voyager series has 39 buttons available – so I have two buttons to spare.
I quickly adjusted one Free42 skin to see how it could look like:
CLS and R↑ buttons are added to this skin, I plan to replace R↑ with “42” button, which should be like “second shift”, and for Free42 configurations.
CLS may be replaced with SST→ & SST↑. (They will look quite logical in this configuration).
But still, my biggest problem: how to put the text on labels. It is hard to find something white to write on the black buttons. Any ideas?