it's a one dollar scientific calculator in a plastic bag
i was shopping at dollar tree recently and i noticed they're selling these scientific
calculators under their jot brand for one dollar and because this is in such a thin plastic bag
and it comes with a battery there's nothing stopping you from just using it in the bag
so if you ever have some important calculations to do
and you don't have a calculator on hand just stop by your local dollar tree you can use this
all you want i mean there's usually only one or two employees in the entire store so they probably
have more important things to do than try to kick out people using their calculators so you can just
camp out in dollar tree and do your math homework and when you're done just put it back on the shelf
and it has to be probably the smallest scientific calculator i've ever seen i mean if you compare it
to a standard four function calculator it's about the same size on the back you can see imported by
greenbrier international which is the company that runs dollar tree and they even list the exact date
that the battery in it was made the 9th of april 2021 and it says the battery contains mercury
so let's unbag it and take a closer look
there it is the one dollar electronic scientific calculator i mean isn't it obvious it's electronic
has there even been a mechanical scientific calculator ever made i guess that's the actual
company that makes it scenery electronics limited and there are those tiny buttons with a lot of sub
functions the main number and function buttons are a little bit bigger but they're still pretty small
turn it on you get degrees radians
or grads i still don't know what the grad is never had a reason to use it
typical functions like sine cosine tangent or you can do hex and octal and decimal that's good the
first thing i typically do to test the accuracy of a calculator is to do the square root of two
times the square root of two the answer should
obviously just be two and we do get two but a lot of cheaper calculators you get like 1.999998
because it's doesn't have enough precision to give you the real result
and a similar test is to do 1 divided by 9 times nine which obviously should just be one and it
is on this calculator but if i do that on the good old commodore one divided by nine times
nine i get .9999999 so the accuracy of this thing is better than the first generation intel pentium
oh i forgot to take a look at the owner's pamphlet which it comes with it says thank you very much
for purchasing our electronic calculator to help ensure its longevity do not touch the inside of
the calculator okay i guess you can take it apart just as long as you don't touch anything inside it
and avoid and avoid hard knocks so this is not a calculator for a hard knock life
and unduly strong key pressing so light touch only you can't use it
below freezing okay i'll remember that don't take it on your ski trip
or above 104 degrees fahrenheit so don't take it to death valley either
for servicing contact your retailer or nearby dealer yeah like somebody's actually going
gonna service a one dollar calculator that came in a plastic bag special care should
be taken to not damage the unit by bending or dropping does it really bend that much
not really for example do not carry in your hip pocket so this is not for hipsters
i like how they give automatic power off an acronym
apo and they say it will automatically turn off approximately eight minutes yeah they
built it even they don't know exactly how long it'll take until it turns off
now i want to try the hex conversion thing for example 255 converted to hex is ff and switch back
to decimal and the capacity of a commodore 64. 65536 bytes converted to hex is 10000
and of course you can convert the other way too from hex to decimal for example the printer port
location of the original ibm pc 3bc hex converted to decimal and that's 956 and it does binary too
so 255 decimal converted to binary is 11111111 or in hex as we saw earlier ff or an octal 377.
it does have a random number generator which generates random numbers between 0 and 1
although it only has three digit precision so it's really not that great
but here's a big goof i just noticed normally calculators will not let you do
a square root of a negative number because that generates an imaginary number which something like
this obviously cannot represent but this one just lets you do square roots of negative numbers like
negative seven square root negative 1.912 so it just doesn't care it just lets you do square roots
of negative numbers as if they were positive and it just sticks a negative sign in front of them
and everyone in the U.S. knows the square root of three
because 1732 was the year george washington was born and it's 1.732
and if you try to do an overflow for example by doing all eights times two it goes into
scientific notation except it doesn't put an e there and it can keep going all the way up to e99
but above that you finally get an overflow error
and it does have a backspace which is nice this little button here
it generally is pretty responsive except if you do a cube root for example i'll do the
cube root of pi and you can see it took a little bit to come up with the answer
but now just a couple minutes later it's no longer letting me do the square root
of negative numbers it just says error but you definitely saw it on video earlier where
it would just give the square root as if it was positive and stick a negative sign in front of it
so i don't know what's going on with that i mean it's good that
it's finally working like it should but i don't know what was going on before
but for something that sells for a dollar in this day and age i guess i can't complain too much
i'm sure many of you wanted to see what it looks like inside so here it is and as expected it's
pretty much exactly the same as the basic four function calculators
you just get a membrane keyboard a single blob chip doing everything on the back of the lcd
and a single lr1130 battery even though it looks like there's space for two and at least it doesn't
have a fake solar cell i think my video about that ended that trend in these cheap calculators