Porting Symbulator to Nspire

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Summary:

Is it possible - and if so, how difficult would it be - to port the Symbulator, a circuit simulator written in TI-Basic for the TI-89, so that it can run on the Nspire CAS / CX CAS?

Porting Symbulator to Nspire

Roberto Perez-Franco 08 Jun 2013 06:32

Hello. My name is Roberto Perez-Franco. I currently work at MIT. Fifteen years ago I started writing a program in TI-Basic, the Symbulator, which after two years of work became my undergraduate thesis, and a very solid piece of code, widely used by electrical engineering students. Ten years have elapsed since I made the last bug fix to the program. In the intervening time TI has discontinued the TI-89.

The program should run fine in the TI-89 Titanium, but I am wondering… since TI has gone all in with this Nspire thing, would it be possible to port the Symbulator to the Nspire CAS platform? I am willing to make the Symbulator an open source or a CC BY NC SA licensed software. The idea is to keep it alive, free and available for future generations of engineering students. It's a pretty strong program.

Any ideas?

Re: Porting Symbulator to Nspire

Weregoose 08 Jun 2013 20:55

Ask again here; I feel the demographic is a little more experient and should be better able to guide you.

Roberto (guest) 10 Jun 2013 01:24

Thanks. Will do.

Re: Porting Symbulator to Nspire

Xeda Elnara 09 Jun 2013 09:03

Hi Roberto! It might be a good idea to port this to the Nspire, and depending on which CAS features are actually used, it might be possible to port it to the z80 calculators, too (possibly with the help of the Symbolic App). Currently, I believe there is more active development and activity with Nspire programming than with the 68k calcs. From what I have heard, though, Nspire BASIC is a very watered down programming language that lacks many important functions. There are alternatives that you can use, though, such as Lua and C.

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Z80 Assembly>English>TI-BASIC>Python>French>C>0

Roberto (guest) 10 Jun 2013 01:29

Thanks for your response. That is precisely the dilemma: on the one hand, I hear Nspire is not as programming friendly as the TI-89, which is a downer; and on the other hand I see this is the way TI is moving, which is astounding, because it is - from the point of view of programming - a step back.

I do not recall what features my program uses. It took me about 2.5 years, and it's been 13 years since I made any significant change to the code. To say I'm rusty in TI-Basic is an understatement, and I am a full-time MIT researcher now, with a wife and kid, and very little time.

My time constraint basically eliminates the posiblity of me programming it in Lua or C. I would be willing to make the program open source or CC or whatever it takes so that others can port it, though. So far the Symbulator has been free, but copyrighted. At the time I did it I did not know of open source. And in the last decade I have done nothing about Symbulator.

But now I am planning to publish a book about how to use the Symbulator, because I think most people have not realized all the power it packs. This book would be published in April 2014.

Re: Porting Symbulator to Nspire

JuanG 15 Jun 2013 03:39

Hello Roberto, from Chiriqui :)
I didn't know that a Panamanian was the creator of symbulator, I'm studying electromechanical engineering at UTP-Chiriqui, and I had programmed very basics programs for circuits 3 (power systems), I'm entering in these aspects of pragramming, I use a TI nspire CX CAS and I was seeing that porting symbulator to Nspire is a great idea, I had this idea too but I'm a newbie in LUA,
Estoy orgulloso que un panameño haya programado el symbulator, espero que sigas teniendo exitos

Roberto (guest) 07 Apr 2014 18:00

Juan,

Yes, I'm from Panama. My wife is from Chiriqui. Symbulator was my graduation thesis at UTP. Currently I work at MIT.

I have updated Symbulator to version 6, which is in beta now.

Hopefully, I will find a way to port it to the Nspire, but so far it doesn't seem worth the effort.

Take care!

Roberto

Gaetan (guest) 10 Jun 2014 11:49

Hello Roberto,
Have you published your book ? Or do you still plan it ?
thanks