casio fx-190

here is another interesting idea from casio. a calculator with an electronic scale and its programmable!

this rather stylish and well made machine is scientific with two lcd displays. the main display is segmented 8 digit lcd with tiny annunciators and the scale display consists of 150 1mm segments along the ruler. internally the machine operates 11 digits. to the right of the on/off switch is a contrast adjust.

the buttons are rather small to accommodate the slimness of the design and take careful pressing if you have sausage fingers.

internally, the machine is neatly compact, taking 2xcr2032 for power and has a carefully folded plastic circuit connector which connects the long scale display.

despite the initial simplistic looks, this machine has some very advanced as well as unusual features. it supports fractions, statistics, six levels of parentheses (no implied multiply), trigs and logs, powers, roots, cube root (no hyperbolics) and its programmable.

it appears to have about 55 steps of blind-man's program. there are no labels, but a loop can be created that jumps back to the start of the program. the instructions, x>0, x<=M and RTN do this, although i cant find much use for this feature except as means to reject invalid input. you can, however, scale and markup the ruler display inside the program. and this seems to be the purpose of its programmability, to write short scaling and display formula with input validation. the run key has functions ENT and HLT which, when programmed, cause enter (ENT) and answer (HLT) annunciators to appear spookily reminiscent of the fx-201p

there are some other unusual features. the scale display has cursor keys which position a value. keying in a value will scroll to the position and using the cursors a value at a point can be read off. the scale display can also be reversed so that it operates the same but from right to left instead of left to right. there are 8 modes to this machine; scaling, triangle, run, learn, stats, deg, rad, grad. the triangle mode is novel as it has a built-in heron's triangle formula. you can supply the length of the sides a, b & c and get `s', the area and `theta' the angle between a & b.