The TI84 is a graphing calculator from Texas Instruments, and it's been doing a great job of offloading my brain while doing maths for the last few years. I know alot of people that have far fancier calculators, sporting color screens and built in Laplace conversion and Fourier transforms. But the TI84 have always gotten the job done and once you learn your way around the menus it's a really good piece of tech. And also the buttons on it are great.
However when i had my last electronics class i ran into abit of a problem when we started dealing with AC power and every question contained complex numbers. There are two issues:
-The TI84 does not support Matrixes with complex numbers
This almost got me buying a new calculator, but i decided to google for 3rd party apps before buying one. And lo and behold the amazing community around these TI devices came to the rescue:
Linear System Solver 4.0
Frankly this is even better than working with complex numbers in matrixes, as we can avoid setting up the matrixes entirely. Just plug in the equations and you're good to go.
-The TI84 does not fully support degrees when working with numbers on polar form
This issue had me fooled for hours. You see, the TI84 has a setting for working with radians or degrees. And when choosing degrees the calculator spits out answers in degrees. However when giving the input one is forced to always use radians.
Like in this image, what i wanted was to input a vector of length 5 at angle 90 degrees and the calculator gives back a vector of length 5 at 116.62 degrees.
This is actually stated in the manual, but was not particularly intuitive. The soulution is simply converting to radians in the expression ((degrees/360)*2pi).
No comments:
Post a Comment