Why this documentation?

We (Romain Liévin and Tim Singer) are separately developing two PC-based linking programs for TI graphing calculators. Up until now there has not been a single complete and accurate piece of documentation for the Texas Instruments transfer protocol and related information. Rather than write two incomplete documents, we prefer to write a single work that is as complete as possible.

Organization of this document

The first section describes the hardware byte-transfer protocol and the different link cables available when this document was written.
The second section covers the software packet-based protocol of the TI-89 - a must for any link software programmer.
The third section covers all calculators:
- the format of the variable types themselves, which is useful for displaying and manipulating data on a PC.
- the file formats readable by TI's Graph Link software.
- reference tables - two character maps and a table of tokens.

The 'Introduction and Special Thanks' and the 'Hardware Linking' sections are common to the TI-xx documentation.

Special thanks

• Pascal Bouron for his original research in tiprot.txt
• Rusty Wagner for his great debugging tool, Virtual TI.
• Fred from DBA for his doc on the FLASH protocol.

• /tiXX/ProtocolXX.txt (by Romain Liévin).

Contact

Tim Singer:
http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~tsinger/
<tsinger@gladstone.uoregon.edu>
 

Romain Liévin:
http://lpg.ticalc.org/prj_tilp
<roms@lpg.ticalc.org>

The latest version of this documentation can be found on ticalc.org or on either of our web sites.

Table of Contents

Hardware Link Protocol