Hi welcome to a one item mailbag. Um, because I'm so excited about this one. I'm not gonna bother open it anything else. Thank you very much Two Swiss Micros for sending in the DM 42i spoiler alert.

Sorry for all you calculator aficionados. We've had a look at the Swiss micro products before. They are recreations of the famous Hewlett Packard Voyager series and this one is the same as the HP 15 the Voyager landscape. Our format like this: Absolutely classic.

There, they're fantastic. Highly recommended, and we've got the HP 42 for those who are familiar, a very classic calculator, the HP 42 so this is Swiss Micro as recreation of that and I did own a HP 42 at one stage, but I sold it. So sorry. I don't have one to show you a side-by-side but the exciting thing about this is that it's the world's most precise calculator.

Well, let's have a look wash wrap for our protection. That's actually that's it. It's hermetically sealed for our protection. Ah, beautiful.

Let's have a squiz here it comes. Wait for it. I Don't want all the electrons to fall out. It's open up the right way.

Oh, look at that. Ah, that's got an E-ink display. Does it? because it's already on? Oh oh oh, and filled. Are them metal? No that plastic rubbish.

Ah feels is a nice meaty weight in that that feels absolutely fantastic. sorry my lights. The angle of the the new lights just due to the tie where the tiles in the orientation of the tiles in the roof. It's really annoying, but I'll put up an image of the original HP 42.

You'll notice that it's a it's got to be taller because it's got a bigger screen. obviously a multi. Well, it's in a full matrix screen. The original HP 42 was, of course a dual line dot matrix display.

Got some extra soft buttons here. You'll probably notice these extra letters on here. It's got a full alphabetic keyboard added to it, but apart from that I Believe the functionality looks exactly the same all year. Um is shift functions and stuff like that in all your keys apart from that are identical so it should just out of the box work like a HP 42s I believe.

So the good thing about this is that is as I said, the world's most precise calculator. None of these double precision rubbish. This is quadruple precision I Triple E 754 to double La Longue at home which uses I believe 16 bytes per number to actually store that and it can do 34 digit precision and plus Minus 6000 144 exponent. Know that plus Minus 99 Rubbish.

And by the way, the software for this is actually open source because it's actually based on the original 342 software from Thomas Aachen on the and from other people I Believe on the HP Museum Calculator Forum which I used to be big on back in the day sorry I don't visit much anymore and Swiss Micros have taken that added on. added on a you know GUI and a whole interface for it and stuff like that. Anyway, it just looks and feels beautiful gonna the the keys I Don't know how do you compare it with the original? Let's compare it with the 41c. Oh sorry, but this is a feel of vision.

but damn that's close. For close my eyes, stick the tongue at the right angle out there. there. That's pretty similar.

It's a very similar feel, so they're tactile domes in there somewhere. Anyway, let's turn it on. here. We go assume it's got a battery.

look at that. look at that XYZ Tl registers and that booted up instantly. No, these windows calculator rubbish. Oh, I've got a battery indicator and time and date at the top.

Fantastic! So let's let's do something, shall we? Let's go to Whack it on the stack and let's do square root shall we? 1.41 It's like, how do we get our precision Oh out of the box I would have seen my thirty four digits I'll tell you what though, that is a pretty nice display. It very like paperwhite. It's gonna be hard to show here due to the reflections and it's pretty decent if you keep it flat on the bench like this and then look at it at an angle and that's pretty good. I'm not sure if I'm a fan of the dot inside the zero though.

Hmm. I Did find that this function button here actually increased the font size and that's much nicer That just adds lines like that shifts it it right. Justification: instead of left for you right? justification. Fanboys: that does nothing That does nothing.

It's a beat there. It's kind of a bit low, but you know you don't want it too loud and that button calls up the menu and this one arrow while reading help File: Why? oops, Someone do we need to install it? I Don't know. Anyway, font size: Yep. Format: No, that's volume.

Yep. Volumes get louder. Can't a reverse function that size? Do I have to press shift? Yep, there we go. shift.

Wow that's pretty small. I Like that better. Alright, so let's go into display. Oh, there's your problem.

Oh I Want to see art? Is that all it gives you to try that again? Maybe we can fix it to a larger number? Can we do Thirty Eleven? Not that's what. Okay, so it's got the internal precision, but how do we display it? Oh Anyway, for those who don't know, we've got the double with inner key. RPN Of course. Now this algebraic rubbish.

I'm sure it doesn't even have the ability to go into algebraic mode. sacrilege, so they should be 42 included additional functionality and matrix solvers and all sorts of stuff over the 41, but it didn't have like the expandability and stuff like that that the 41 did. and the magnetic card reader and all the rest of it. But you know it made up for that by being a more advanced thinking this: I think thickness.

This might be a fraction thinner if memory serves me correctly than the original 42 at least at this bottom end. B42 was was supposed to be the replacement for the the HP 15 Voyager, but of course everyone loved their Voyagers series. There's lots of Voyager series fanboys out there and on the back we got to reset things, so I'm guessing that must be something else. I can see something in there? Is that like an some sort of infra red thing? perhaps? So no, you want to see inside it? so let's crack it open.

There's two screws here. Looks like they've got some clips at the top, so that's pretty nice. Yes. Copyright 2017 It's been out for a while.

Retail price of about 230 Yankee bucks and I think that's a bargain for a quality calculator. It's beautiful. Oh, the qualities are metal threaded inserts fantastic. How do I readily come apart? No.

It turns out it just needed a small helping hand and as I suspected, yep, and a plastic clips are black gloss, blacks, solder mask. Give me a break. Anyway, there it is. We've got an STR micro and of course you don't need much more.

It's all just one micro. That's it. No, you can't read the number off there, but I'll put up the specs for that. but that's all she wrote really.

The big eyes speaker in there. It's like a single Cr2032 there. Oh A couple of little secret squirrel switches, reset and unnamed. Got our serial and programming headers there, so I'm not sure if that's how you update the firmware or whether or not there's a a remote.

USB I'd be surprised if there's not a remote, Usb update and a bootloader in there. and we've got a pin out for another what looks like another spy header up there. at least LCD connection before unscrewing PCB will do, thank you very much. Calc Base 3b So everywhere.

Oh yeah, look I take out that fur be take out these screws. Ah nice someone was thinking. and the base of the board here is connected with these plastic clips down in here. So this is a really nice design, very well thought out and put together.

So let's crack it open because of course we want to see the tactile domes on there. Are they snap Tron's or anything like that? sorry I didn't follow the development of this I'm sure it's out there and they're quite transparent about the stuff that they do. bloody gloss, black, solder mask hate it now TM Ruin me for life. Everything they did was gloss black.

that's just gonna come out in one hit. Oh Fantastic. There you go for you dome aficionados. Check that out.

Are they snapped? Ron's I don't know I could get out my snap Tron kid I've got like you know, 20 different types of snap Tron domes in a kit when I was developing calculators. it's not feel a vision sorry but of course HP was famous for their calculator. You know the feel of their keys, the snap of their keys Wow yeah that's all molded into the one thing. yeah I think it's entirely integrated with the with the front case mold.

You can see the little lever arm on there I Don't know about, you know, long term these sorts of things. but what efforts gone into this and see that they had to do the extra colour shot there to get the yellow key? Beautiful! Then we've got the metal threaded inserts. Fantastic! So that really comes apart very nicely. for service in and for changing the battery and it's terrific.

I'm impressed. And that whole bottom ah, steel metal thing I don't know what type of metal that is I don't know some tell me and of course we're quadruple precision on the world's most precise, more multimeter. it's gonna see mouldy its precise calculator. It should pass the calculator forensics with flying colors.

So anyway that's the most number of didn't display digits I can get. So what we want to do is nine got to put it on the stack cuz this is our PN and then we go sine cosine, tangent shift, arc, tangent, cosine arc sine no I'm bang on and I've been running through this a bunch of times. I Still can't get it to fail because it's not going to be round back to nine. it's probably internally is still accumulating digits or whatever or losing them.

Then they're way outside the way outside the display window, that's for sure. I Think that's got to be ten times now. Yeah, pretty precise. One thing I don't get is why is this the largest font size we can get? I mean there's obviously like there's a wasted line up there.

Maybe because like you call up the menu of course and it shifts it up? Maybe. but I don't know. Anyway, he nice - well maybe it could have like automatically dropped back when you call up the menu to that rather than like change the font size allow bigger and I don't understand why you'd want to go that small if you can't get always digits. So yeah, and you might ask? well with this gorgeous large screen on here, can we like do plots, graphene, and all that sort of stuff? Well, the answer is yeah, you kinda can.

The HB 42 had rudimentary graphing capability, but it wasn't actually building you had to actually write a program for. It is fairly extensive I couldn't be bothered and yeah, I could get a sine wave up, but yeah, it really wasn't a graphing calculator the HP 42 and neither is this cuz it doesn't have any other functionality as far as I'm aware. part from the 42 S that was the whole goal of the project is that my imagination or is that top line on L They're like missing a line on top. I Think it is.

Look, look at the three. That's right. Like nicely rounded 3s here, but a sort of a chopped off three there. I Don't think I'm imagining that.

There you go, It fixed it. Yeah, there's something doing there. They've got some nice backgrounds in here and you get a different one every time your parrot off and on. So let's do a program.

should be much easier with the multi-line display. Although it still works, the menu based system still works exactly like the original 42 S. So we do is we go shift program function which will give us all our program functions up here on our soft buttons and then we have to label our program first and then if this is how you entered the letters. But you know back in the day.

Well though, can we just go shift? Let's try it. Shift are over here. If where is it? Recognize that we're in that? no, it doesn't doesn't recognize that we're in that mode. Let label mode and it won't let us do that.

Oh, that's a bit of a bummer. Ah, there we go. Oh oh oh' t cuz I like a good route so that's sold for a route. So let's have a look at our program here.

We're going to actually solve the routes for this thing here. so we'll go up. there. We go.

we can see it. It's a big bit convoluted. There you go. It's not the greatest, but hey, this is how the original HP 42 actually worked.

So let's actually run that so we'll go solver. Oh, do we have to exit from that now? I can't remember I Think we can. Just yep, we do. Whoops! Have I goofed it up? No.

I don't think so. Get out of program mode. Okay solver. And then there's our program called a route.

So we'll select route and then we'll make guesses for X So it's there's our variable. It knows we've got the variable inside the program so 1 and 10 and then X And Bingo! X is our first route that was our previous guest there. So now we can. Actually this thing has two routes so we can find another one.

So let's go say minus one. There we go, that's better. Then there's our second route. Fantastic! Love a good route.

So there you go. That's a new Swiss microSD M at 42? Well, it's not new. sorry it's been out for quite some time. That's absolutely fantastic.

And it's really for the calculator aficionados who love their HP 42 because of course, yeah, there are. Well, I'm gonna get attacked for saying this. there are better more usable calculators, but if you're a fan of the HP 42, it was discontinued started in 85. it was discontinued in the early 90s and this is a direct replacement for it with our quad precision instead of what was double precision.

I Assume the original Wire 42 was so absolutely fantastic. and the build, quad, design and build quality of this thing is absolutely brilliant. And it represents many, many years of effort by Thomas Aachen and the calculated community actually coming up with the Free 42 software which this thing is based on and you can get it on that same platform, that same Free 42 software on other platforms. but they built a physical hardware platform for it and it's It's first-class quality.

it just it feels fantastic. So hats off. it's probably worth every cent of. they're like two hundred and thirty bucks.

I Know you know a lot of people say oh, why bother you can't beat a real calculator. This is fantastic but I still prefer my Casio Algebraic sorry, although we do own quite a few HP's I've used them over the years I Guess my only complaint and it is minor: I Would have preferred to have a larger and bolder font on the top of the keys. The the yellow in here is absolutely gorgeous. Really visible, but it really is quite thin on some of the other keys here, and if you compare that to the original HP 42, then you can kind of see the difference.

But yeah, hats off! This thing's brilliant. Huge thumbs up! So if you want to discuss it down below, catch you next time.