Raspberry Pi Forums

I am a highschool student and just started my new school year.
this year they introduced a new fancy calculator at my school, with color display... you can load pictures to calculate angles in it and that kind of cool stuff... but the counter effect of all that cool stuff is the expense... something about 120 euro...
so i thought wouldnt it be better to make a raspberry pi alternative?
Of course you can use a smartphone for it... but that's not really allowed... and physical keys are better for this in my opinion.

I am not that experienced in this kind of stuff, but I guess there are many people who can maybe develop this idea!

http://www.casioeducation.com/products/ ... ZM_fx-CG10

I am sure someone could replicate that calculator with a Pi but at the end of the proverbial day would it be any cheaper or better ?

It's going to cost 30 euro for the Pi, plus the same again for a comparable display, perhaps more, so half the budget's gone already. Then there's keypad, batteries, a box to put it all in, plus writing and debugging the software.

Actually costing it all out properly would be an interesting exercise. I suspect the calculator may turn out to be not quite so over-priced as it may first appear.

At the Camjam yesterday (http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewt ... 57&t=86289), there was a presentation on "Cheating on your Maths Homework with Mathematica"
Having watched it (in part - I missed great chunks due to "prior commitments") I would recommend that most highly.

Raspbian on the Pi comes with Mathematica built-in. It can do most of what a graphics calculator can do, and can do more in some areas.
I would hesitate to say the Pi could replace the calculator, but it could certainly compliment it.

Calculators are not really my thing but there were those time when I've tried to install a simple calculator and wound up installing some strange app that besides the numpad did not resemble the calculators I know. I guess you're looking for something like those.
A friend of mine uses Qalculate and can talk hours about how cool it is.
When I do a quick google for "graphics calculator Linux" there's one name that keeps popping up: ExtCalc, as far as I can tell it looks like it has about the same features you are looking for.
I also found This Page which claims to index the 7 best Linux calculators so that might be worth checking out.

And last but certainly not least; Debian Pure Blends provides meta-packages which can be installed on any Debian based system using the main repository. The Science blend includes a lot of math apps so Check Out This List to see if any of those apps could be of use.

When you execute the following on your Pi it will display a list of all available apps that have the word calculator in their name or description: To view more info for one of these programs execute: Hope this will get you closer to your PiCalc build.