A home-brewed graphing calculator called Open SciCal promises to put a powerful machine built entirely from open-source hardware into the pockets of quant jocks and statisticians.

"This is for the alpha nerds of the geek kingdom," says Matt Stack, who built Open SciCal. "The calculator used to be the ultimate status symbol among the nerdiest of the nerds and I wanted to bring that back."

Open SciCal has a 4.3-inch color touchscreen and is just a little bigger than an iPhone. The device uses a BeagleBoard, a low-power, single-board computer that's based on the same 1-GHz ARM Cortex A8 processor that drives most sophisticated smartphones today. It also has a 8-GB SD card, Wi-Fi capability and can run a web browser.

"It's about the same weight as my Logitech G9 mouse (which weighs about 1.6 pounds)," says Stack.

A graphing calculator can take data sets and plot graphs in addition to running scientific functions on it. Many graphing calculators allow users to attach sensors to them so they can log data directly into the device. But as data sets increase in size and complexity, they are outgrowing traditional graphing calculators available from companies such as HP and Texas Instruments. Add to that restrictions on the kind of external sensors that can be attached and it makes a device built on open-source components an attractive alternative, says Stack.

Open SciCal can run Linux and R – a programming language used in statistical computing – and will let users program in C or Perl. All this for just $200.

"Texas Instruments has a calculator called Nspire that cost about as much but doesn't do half that this calculator does," says Stack.

To test Open SciCal, Stack used existing data to predict sunspots and understand the statistical significance of a recent solar storm.

Another task for the Open SciCal: Pull stock data from sites like Yahoo Finance and run auto-correlation on the data to discern trends in the stock.

"It's like every hedge fund quant's dream," says Stack, "and I have a device in my pocket now that can do that."

Check out more photos of the Open SciCal:

The SciCal can predict sunspots by using existing data to create graphs.

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Photos: Matt Stack