Texas Instruments TI-nspire/TI-84 Plus Silver Edition Mode
From Wiki
Texas Instruments TI-nspire (TI-84 Plus Silver Edition Keyboard)
- Type: Algebraic Electronic Calculator
- Size: 4 x 8 inches / 10 x 20 cm
- Serial/Lot number: 2016078547 / S-0507
- Date of Manufacture: May 2007
Stick a special keyboard into a neato piece of "math and science learning technology" and you get a calculator! How about that!? The Texas Instruments TI-nspire comes with a second keyboard that turns it into a TI-84 Plus. TI's explanation for this is reverse compatibility. If you get your kid the nspire but that crummy public school she goes to is still using TI-83s, then you haven't wasted your money. Well, not much, anyway.
The TI-84 keyboard is key compatible with the TI-83, TI-84 and TI-84 Plus. Also included are the TI-84 Plus's canned applications. There's a time value of money app; Cabri Junior, a geometry exploration application; CellSheet, a simple spreadsheet/data grapher; EasyData, an interface to external data collection equipment; InEqual which lets you graph inequality relations; Learning Check, some sort of school assignment manager; a periodic table application; a probability simulator that tosses virtual coins, rolls virtual dice, draws virtual cards and provides lottery numbers for bored 9th graders; Science Tools which provides vector and unit calculations, yet another graphing program and a calculator that keeps significant figures in mind; some sort of flash card application in which it's not clear how to get cards into the device; and a transformational graphing plugin that is opaque to me.
The problem is, TI didn't include any printed documentation on how the TI-84 mode works. They didn't even provide soft copy on the CDROM they included. Sure, the manual is available from the website, but why?
The TI-84 keyboard includes the stereo-plug serial port at the bottom end. You can also communicate via the USB port at the top of the handheld. (No serial port on the native keyboard.)
