Re: gcalctool now less useful

[Robert Ancell <robert ancell canonical com>]

On 08/04/10 13:04, James wrote:
> Hi Robert,
>
> On Thu, 2010-04-08 at 12:08 +1000, Robert Ancell wrote:
>    
> > - Could you run through an example of the sort of calculation you are
> > doing?
> >      
> Often in my line of work I have an ADC input on some micro and the value
> I get is in hex, or I'm looking at a protocol message like Modbus for
> example, and the values stored in the message are in hex.
>
> The first thing I need to do is convert from hex to decimal.  Secondly,
> the values are often unscaled raw ADC values, so I need to apply some
> scaling, which invariably involves a constant like PI, or the need for
> some scientific function.
>
> So to have the ability to enter numbers in bin, oct, dec or hex in
> scientific mode would be most handy.
>
> Maybe there should be an engineering "mega" mode that combines the
> programming and scientific functions?
>
>    
In gcalctool 5.30 you could type the following from the keyboard (using 
alt+number for subscript and ctrl+P for π - all other input is standard 
keyboard input):

BEEF₁₆×π÷FFFF₁₆

The downside of 5.30 is you need to type the ₁₆ each time which is 
tedious - I am working in 5.31 to get this better so you can set the 
default base and type:

BEEF×π÷FFFF