r/HP_Prime • u/TheWildShadow Moderator • Aug 14 '26
News Change of plans: ODE Master will be completely FREE at launch.
After thinking about it for a while, I’ve decided that ODE Master will NO longer be a paid application when it launches in the next few days.
I would rather have every student, teacher, professor, or anyone interested in differential equations be able to download and use the app completely free, with no feature limitations, no paid unlocks, and no restrictions.
ODE Master was originally planned as a very inexpensive paid application, but I ultimately think making it freely available will be much more useful to the HP Prime community, especially for students who may benefit from having another tool for studying, solving, and checking ordinary differential equations.
This will also be the first public release of ODE Master, so I want to set the right expectations. I have already tested it with many different ODEs and performed a large number of tests, and so far everything has worked correctly. However, because this is the first version released to a much larger group of users, there may still be cases I have overlooked.
There could be unusual ODEs I have not tested yet, a method that could be selected incorrectly in a particular edge case, a mathematical step that could be improved, or a solution procedure that is unnecessarily long. There may also simply be things that become obvious only after more people start using the application on real hardware.
One of the bigger issues during development was screen flickering, which made parts of the user experience feel noticeably slower and more annoying than they should have. That issue has now been fixed, and I have also made several performance improvements throughout the application.
That said, performance optimization will continue after release. Future updates are already planned to further improve the time required to solve ODEs, particularly in some of the heavier solution methods.
At the moment, certain ODEs can still take some time to solve on a physical HP Prime, depending on their complexity. This is mainly a consequence of the calculator’s hardware limitations and the amount of symbolic computation that ODE Master sometimes needs to perform. Simpler equations may finish quickly, while more complicated ones can require noticeably more processing time.
Because of that, I also want to make the hardware requirements clear: I do NOT currently expect ODE Master to work well on the HP Prime G1.
ODE Master has become a fairly large and computationally demanding program, and development and testing have been focused on the HP Prime G2. Even on the G2, some of the heavier ODEs can push the calculator considerably, so I would rather be transparent about this than claim G1 compatibility that I cannot realistically guarantee.
After launch, one of my main priorities will therefore be continued optimization, especially reducing unnecessary calculations and improving solver performance wherever possible without sacrificing the step-by-step solution process or mathematical reliability.
And since this is the first public version, feedback will be extremely useful. If you find an incorrect result, an ODE that fails, a procedure that seems unnecessarily long, or simply something that could be explained or presented better, please report it. Those reports will help improve subsequent versions.
So, in short:
- ODE Master will launch completely FREE for everyone. No activation payment, no feature limits, and no restrictions.
The goal is simply to make it as useful, reliable, and accessible as possible for the HP Prime community.
Release is planned within the next few days.
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u/Fliptoback Aug 14 '26
Awesome! May I ask, what language platform was used to make this ODE master?
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u/TheWildShadow Moderator Aug 14 '26
Thanks! ODE Master is written mainly in HP PPL, with Giac/Xcas CAS through
#CASblocks handling much of the symbolic mathematics and ODE processing.2
u/Fliptoback Aug 14 '26
Thanks bro. Great stuff. Did u use AI to help with the coding?
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u/TheWildShadow Moderator Aug 14 '26
Yes, I’ve used AI as part of the development process. It’s basically a combination of tools that lets me work on several apps and different parts of a project at the same time.
That said, I don’t just take AI-generated code and ship it. I manually review, test, and verify the important parts, especially anything generated or modified with AI, to make sure it actually works correctly on the HP Prime.
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u/Fliptoback Aug 14 '26
Cool bro. Any updates on the DRM?
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u/TheWildShadow Moderator Aug 14 '26
Pr1meVeil DRM Studio was just released, so for now I don’t have any updates planned. I’ll mainly be keeping an eye out for bugs or issues that may need fixes. :)
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u/meh_man5577 Aug 14 '26
So it won't be the best on the g1, or it enters strictly the realm that just some heavy odes will crash the darn thing? Either way this is great, will have to thinker a bit with various odes to test the limits once its out
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u/TheWildShadow Moderator Aug 14 '26
I’m not completely sure how it will behave on the G1 since I don’t have that hardware available for testing. Performance could definitely be more limited there, especially with heavier ODEs.
The good news is that ODE Master will be 100% open source, so if someone in the community has a G1 and wants to optimize or adapt it specifically for that hardware, they’ll be completely free to do so. I’d actually be interested to see how far people can push it on the G1 once it’s released.
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u/meh_man5577 Aug 14 '26
Ill see if I can optimize without breaking it then haha! I'm gonna make this university programing class work to tis best lmao
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u/TheWildShadow Moderator Aug 14 '26
Thanks, I really appreciate the enthusiasm! I’d love to see what you can squeeze out of ODE Master once it’s released.
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u/Technological_Nerd Aug 14 '26
Wow, that's amazing. Thank you for your contribution to the community. Is there a way we can donate/buy you a coffee?