This week, TI released the newest operating system for the TI-84 Plus CE, TI-84 Plus CE-T, and TI-83 Premium CE: OS 5.2. This updates brings major useful updates for TI-BASIC programmer, as well as a few improvements for regular users. We want to discuss some of the most important updates, outside of small bugfixes. First, some commands and tokens:
We hope you enjoy this update, and highly recommend to change your programs, using the newest BASIC tokens, which are really useful. We particular look forward to testing out the new TI-BASIC programming features with the TI-Innovator. Special thanks to Cemetech moderator PT_ for researching and writing most of this article!
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TI-84 Plus CE OS 5.2
- They updated some BASIC commands to interact with the TI-Innovator, released last month. Sending (Send() and receiving (Get() strings is now possible, and deep inside, there is now extensive code to communicate with serial-over-USB devices, including the TI MSP432 Launchpad and the Arduino family of microcontroller boards.
- eval( - basically the same as expr(, but it stores the answer in a string, which is often necessary by BASIC programmers, who needs this token in a program. Instead of the large and slow LinReg routine, use this token to simple convert a calculation to a string. This was added to make it easier to construct commands to send to the TI-Innovator.
- toString( - this token is pretty similar to eval(. There is one big difference however: toString( handles the format in which the result was returned. expr( and eval( cannot handle lists as output, while toString( handles lists, matrices and more. This is one of the most-missed tokens in BASIC ever, so it's a good thing TI added it!
- Wait - pauses the program execution for a specific amount of seconds. Instead of using something like rand(999 or a For-loop, just use this, if you want to have a delay in your program, for example when displaying text, and let the user read it.
- There are also a variety of new tokens that have numerical values (like the color tokens, eg RED, BLACK, BLUE, etc.) for working with the TI-Innovator, like LEFT (0), CENTER (1), and RIGHT (2).
- There is a new pieceWise( command in the OS, but it doesn't appear to be useable yet.
- This update is rather useful in combination with an online BASIC program editor, such as SourceCoder. When your program has an error somewhere, you don't need to figure out at which line it is, because the line number of the error is shown inside the status bar! Could be useful for debugging.
- There is a big focus on sequences. Outside of adding 15 tokens relating to sequences, they added support for u(n)=u(n-1)+u(n-2) for example. It can now take the 2 previous results, instead of only the last one. Because it's possible, let's just display the Fibonacci Sequence, shown below.
- The calculator has some improvements when hitting [ALPHA]+[one of the top 5 keys]. It adds in blue font how it will look like at the homescreen in Mathprint-mode.
- TI added some tokens which are all probability-related. invNorm( now can take another argument, LEFT, RIGHT or CENTER, for the area under the curve. It should be a bit easier when using invNorm(
- A new application is published, called Hub. This small app adds a menu to the program editor, which all the sending/getting commands in it.
- Many TI apps got an upgrade, so if you use one of them, be sure to download the latest version!
- The exam mode changed a little bit, program won't be erased, so when going back to normal mode, you will still find it on your calculator.
- Outside of all the calculator changes, there is also a new version of TI Connect CE, also labeled version 5.2.
We hope you enjoy this update, and highly recommend to change your programs, using the newest BASIC tokens, which are really useful. We particular look forward to testing out the new TI-BASIC programming features with the TI-Innovator. Special thanks to Cemetech moderator PT_ for researching and writing most of this article!
Download
TI-84 Plus CE OS 5.2