WP 34S Owner‘s Manual
Edition 2.2
Page 5 of 103
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integer computing in arbitrary bases from binary to hexadecimal,
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financial operations like mean rate of return and margin calculations,
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80 conversions, mainly between universal SI and old Imperial units,
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50 fundamental physical constants as precise as known today by national stan-
dards institutes like NIST or PTB, plus some more out of mathematics, astro-
nomy, and surveying,
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complete Greek and extended Latin letter fonts covering many languages on
this planet (upper and lower case in two font sizes each).
The WP 34S is the first RPN calculator overcoming the limits of a 4-level stack
– forget worries about stack overflow in calculations. It features a choice of two stack
sizes expanded by a complex LASTx register: traditional four stack levels for HP
compatibility, eight levels for convenient calculations in complex domain, advanced
real calculus, vector algebra, or for whatever application you have in your mind. You
find a full set of commands for stack handling and navigation in either size.
Furthermore, your WP 34S features over 100 general purpose registers, 104 user
flags, 506 program steps in working memory, more than 2500 in flash, a 31 byte al-
pha register for message generation, and 4 programmable hotkeys for your favorite
functions or routines. And you may backup your work in battery-fail-safe memory.
Your WP 34S is the result of a long range collaboration of two individuals, an Austral-
ian and a German. We did this in our free time, so you may call it our hobby (though
some people close to us found different names for this). From its very beginning, our
project was discussed on the forum of the
Museum of HP Calculators
(
www.hpmuseum.org
), so we want to express our gratitude to all the international
contributors there who taught us a lot and brought their ideas and support in several
stages of our project. Special thanks go to Marcus von Cube (Germany) supporting
us in bringing the WP 34S to life, starting with an emulator for v1.14, allowing wide-
spread use and convenient testing. From v1.17 on, the software runs on the real
hardware as well. A very useful assembler / disassembler is supplied by Neil Hamil-
ton (Canada) since v1.18 and even a symbolic preprocessor was added with v2.1.
We baptized our baby WP 34S in honor of one of the most powerful LED pocket cal-
culators, the
HP-34C
of 1979. The WP 34S is our humble approach
– with the hard-
ware given
– to a future 43S we can only dream of becoming the successor of the
HP-42S
once. May the WP 34S help in convincing those having access to more re-
sources than us: covering the market of serious scientific instruments is worthwhile.
Firmware-wise, we have carefully checked everything we could think of to our best
knowledge, so our hope may be justified the WP 34S is free of bugs. Anyway, we
promise we will continue improving the WP 34S whenever it turns out being neces-
sary
– so if you discover any strange result, please report it to us, and if it is revealed
to be an internal error we will provide you with an update as soon as we have got one
ourselves. We did show short response times so far, and we will continue this way.
Enjoy!
Paul Dale and Walter Bonin
