How would the "deep sleep" work?

maybe it's like vista's "hibernate" as compared to "sleep"

From the website: the deep sleep mode is enabled after 4 days of no use, so it will save battery life in time like during school breaks.

I wasn't aware that calculators used very much battery power while they are turned off, but I suppose that they might; my nSpire went through its first set of batteries fairly quickly, so I hope this helps it slightly.

The Nspire must use a lot of battery power if it actually needs a “deep sleep” mode. Wonder what it does when it's turned off that would use up so much power?

I would hope that it works reasonably well with rechargeable batteries. My other TI graphing calculators work okay with NiMH batteries except the “low battery” indication sometimes doesn't trigger, and I've even had the batteries die so suddenly that it caused a RAM reset. I get around that problem by making sure I recharge them before they have a chance to get low.

I am curious how fast it would eat my batteries if I decided to program on it as much as I used to do on my TI-83+ (non-SE) back in the days, let says if the Nspire got decent game programming capabilities. On a 83+ I used to go through one set of Duracells/Energizer e2 per month and 2 weeks using the cheap brands at the dollar store

If the calculator is broken it can eat batteries like crazy when turned off. I stopped using my TI-83+SE last February after it started completly draining my sets of Duracells with under 2 days of non-use, even after a fresh reset and changing the lithium battery. It was heavily used (like between 30-70 hours a week) and 6 years old though.

I seem to remember people reporting things like that happening to various calculators before. That's kind of weird.

I once came back to find my 84+ SE completely drained of batteries after a few months of non-use

When turning on a unit after a deep sleep, it goes through the reboot process. There is a bar that shows the progress. It is similar to removing a battery and putting it back in.

Interesting, thanks for that tidbit.

The only thing I can think of that the calculator would be doing while off is running the On button handler and the clock update in interrupts, probably more though.

That's what's kind of weird—that's what the other calcs do, too, but on those that uses very, very little power. They must be using a more power-hungry CPU or hardware or something on the Nspire. Maybe just a price to pay for more computing power?

Clocks and running interrupts to check for on should not use any power. Think about how long a standard digital watch battery lasts (the watch uses most of its power to update the lcd probably, though).

This is really intriguing. Also, what exactly are the disadvantages of going into deep sleep mode? Why didn't they just make it activate after 1 day instead of 4?

That's not true. The processor obviously has to use power to execute the interrupt handlers...
This will certainly drain the batteries over an extended period of time.

Yes, in theory. But on the other hand, the RTC update triggers once every second (once every eternity from a CPU point of view) and executes what, a dozen instructions? Waiting for the ON-interrupt takes no power at all, since that's exactly what waiting for an interrupt does: nothing at all (until the interrupt triggers of course).
Seriously, the power it spends on retaining the contents of RAM (keeping the RAM chip powered) are probably a couple orders of magnitude larger than what the CPU needs for itself.

no, ive noticed that the nspire will save the contents of the ram to the archive(flash rom) when you turn it off sometimes, so it can stop powering the ram. It reloads it when you turn it back on. this is why it takes a long period of time sometimes to turn off or on.

"Operating system enhancements - Changes based on customer feedback."

Wait did they add 3d graphing and "real" programmability?

Yep i'm not getting one till that day comes, or it gets cracked... :D

3D graphing is available (see the url link) by a clever use of the scatterplot function, but it is not provided by Texas Instruments.

Using a similar technique, I am attempting to create a pong game, but I haven't figured out how to get the ball working (I have a nice moving paddle for you and an idea about how to allow your opponent to move).

b-flat, I checked your link and saw a program called Timer.

I look forward to someone coming up with a stopwatch like the "Timer..." app posted on the ticalc org website. That one can even be calibrated.

The timer program for the Nspire runs incredibly fast on the computer software, of course.

Wow that is really impressive given the limitations.

How fast is it to render that i wonder.

Happy new year everybody!

right on the minute for your time zone, lol.

i have 2.5 hours yet...

Actually for Greenwich Mean Time, which ticalc.org goes by. Where I live I still have an hour left.

I am curious when (or if) they will implement custom time on front page for news for everyone. Under "Timezones" in my account I see "In the future, we may be able to display times in your local timezone.", but it has been there since I opened this account in 2003.

Anyway happy new year everyone

GMT is far superior in all ways.

It says "may", not "will". ;-)

Well, he did say “when (or if)”. :-)

kind of pointless to even have that any more if those guys arent planning anything.

Okay, this started to make me curious, so I asked about it. :-) What I was told is that implementing this feature would be quite difficult due to the way content is handled on this site (just about all the pages on the server are written ahead of time; the server doesn't generate them “on-the-fly” when someone loads them). I doubt they have anyone right now with the time and inclination to develop and test a whole new dynamic content scheme for the entire site (assuming the dual 200 MHz Pentium Pros could handle it).

Maybe someone could write a Greasemonkey script or something to do it, though? Then it could be implemented on the browser side.

I'm guessing that the reason it still says they may be able to do that in the future is because there's always a chance that some day something could come up and it *could* happen... even if not too likely. ;-)