Late alarms and uninterruptible ANIMATE
Irl
in the internal operating system on my HP50g+ (ROM 2.09)
1. Alarms occur anywhere from a minute to an hour, sometimes more,
later than they are set for. To test this I made an executable alarm
(wrong term, I forget the actual name: an alarm that runs a program)
which grabs the time and puts it on the stack, then set a bunch of
them and looked at the result. They were either within 1 second or off
by 1 minute. Other alarms can be an hour late, and occasionally they
are late by some random interval.
2. ANIMATE sometimes doesn't let itself be interrupted by the ON key.
The relevant code is: with 2 GROBs on the stack
{2. {#0h #0h} .5 25.} ANIMATE
If I run this, and while the two GROBs are alternating I hit ON,
sometimes nothing happens. Sometimes it interrupts, as desired.
Sometimes, if I hold the ON key for a couple of seconds and then
release it and hit it again, it will interrupt.
I'm wondering if the problem, previously noted, of keyc-clicks being
ignored if they occur when the processor is doing something in
particular, may be causing it to ignore or not run the code which
checks the time and fires off an alarm if it is due.
Any likelihood that this is a known bug, or that it will be fixed in
the next ROM?
John H Meyers
> I made a "control" alarm (an alarm that runs a program)
> which grabs the time and puts it on the stack,
> then set a bunch of them and looked at the result.
> They were either within 1 second or off by 1 minute.
Did the "1-second" bunch all occur slightly early,
and the "1-minute" bunch all occur a minute late?
(or vice versa?)
> Other alarms can be an hour late, and occasionally
> they are late by some random interval.
That explains why I'm not in bed by 10:00 PM night after night;
I've been using the darned calculator to tell me when to stop work :)
HP48 series control alarms interrupt anything else, IIRC
(which can be frustrating if you were editing a large program
and hadn't saved it back into its variable for quite a while);
"message" alarms at least politely waited for any running program
to finish, thus they could appear "late" if you were keeping
the calc busy -- I don't know whether anything differs in 49 series.
> ANIMATE sometimes doesn't let itself be interrupted by the ON key.
Sometimes I get so animated myself
that I don't even let myself be interrupted by the
"go to bed" alarm, so if anyone can fix that in the calculator,
please post the solution so I can try also fixing it in my head.
-[ ]-