Me & My Limited Goals
I am a complete outsider to the C47/R47 project, having taken a roundabout path to get here in time for the denouement.
I tell you this so that you understand where these wiki articles — or blog posts, if you prefer — are coming from. I have long experience with HP calculators, RPN and non, but I am not anyone’s idea of an insider or expert. I am an end user, a low-grade enthusiast, and an idiosyncratic collector. Some will find this perspective useful, others amusing, and still others annoyingly ignorant. Sorry; how it is.
I have no wish to produce a third-party R47 user manual,1 neither by displacing the efforts ongoing within the C47 project, nor by joining the C47 project as a technical writer. The prior paragraph should answer the “why” of that adequately; do you really want a relative ignoramus like me writing your calculator manual? Didn’t think so. The best I can hope for is to approximate the state of “beginner’s mind” wisely praised by the Zen Buddhists, bringing a fresh perspective to this project. More likely, my self-appointed gadfly role may at least spur the C47 project’s internal efforts along.
My sole connection to the C47 project’s complicated history is that I once built a WP34s, which has largely been gathering dust ever since. I expect to offer an indirect explanation for that by contrasting its operation with that of the R47, but for now you may consider the fact that I pressed the Buy button to be confirmation that I decided the R47 would not become another shelf queen in my local collection.
Because I am a come-lately end user who never owned a DM42[n], who further has zero expectation of ever buying one with the intent of converting it to a C47, I will henceforth use the production name R47, the device I actually have here at hand.
What follows will be an ad hoc exploration, with directions taken as inspiration strikes.
First-Party User Manual
My understanding is that the members of the C47 project have but vague plans to produce a proper user manual as of this writing, in early November 2025. As far as I am aware, the closest publications toward this ideal are:
Because the C47 forked from the WP43 project, their manuals are of use with the R47, provided you are willing to mentally translate all the genetic drift that has occurred since that fateful point.
An Index of My Humble Offerings
Because the wiki software backing this site does not offer hierarchical structuring,2 I will use the remainder of this page to link to the others in a more coherent order than Fossil’s flat alphabetical list:
- A Beginner’s Journey — you are here!
- R47 vs DM32 — a comparative review
- User Explorations
- Unboxing — a vignette
- Setup — with a focus on the most important configuration choices to be made early on
- Setting the Date & Time — implicitly, a brief tour of the menus and basic functionality
- Swaps — there is more to it in the R47 than
x≷y
License
This work is © 2025 by Warren Young and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
- ^ Distinct from the present piles of disconnected reference PDFs.
- ^ Fossil’s file-based embedded documentation feature does allow hierarchical structuring, but we are not yet at a point where converting from wiki form makes sense. The rule of thumb I adhere to is that Fossil’s wiki is for evergreen comment, embedded docs for material which must remain in lockstep with some other deliverable. This makes the wiki the natural form, for now.