Texas Instruments TI-Innovator Hub

This systems seems to have good STEM potential. Run some simple experiments, documented on the TI Education website or learn how to do some calculator coding and control the buzzer or LEDs.

Is this product worth it? Well, the first question is: why do you want it?If you have to buy it for a class or something, well, there's no point in reading a review.So I am going to approach this as if you're a casual consumer who is considering this.What does this gadget even do? Well, I view it as essentially turning your TI-84+CE into a Raspberry Pi. Like the Raspberry Pi, the TI-84+CE is a fully programmable computer, and the Pi also has GPIO pins that let you directly interact with a breadboard and external hardware, which the TI-Innovator Hub also provides. I'd assume most people who buy this are buying it for this reason, that it lets you connect your calc to external hardware and to a breadboard and make it interact with external physical hardware.In that sense, it's a cool toy. If you are teaching yourself to build components on a breadboard and want to be able to control them with a computer, well, this can do that. However, I only view it as just that: a toy. It requires you to control it with the TI-84+CE's version of TI-BASIC, which is a bit slow and limits what you can do.Honestly, if you have a classic monochrome TI-84+ you can just buy a 2.5mm jack and connect it to a breadboard that way. You essentially would get two GPIO pins that you could control through TI-BASIC or even Z80 assembly for much faster speeds and serious coding. It was a huge disappointment to see Texas Instruments remove that 2.5mm port altogether on the TI-84+CE, but at least we get the TI-Innovator Hub that sort of fills that void.But the biggest issue with the TI-Innovator Hub, in my opinion, is the price. The TI-Innovator Hub is listed as $64 as I'm writing this, and it requires the TI-84+CE that is $123 as I'm writing this. A Raspberry Pi is $35. A Raspberry Pi is great for both serious coders--since its GPIO pins can be controlled with C--and casual coders since it can be controlled with simpler languages like Python. A Raspberry pi also offers way more features, you can even just use it as a regular every-day computer since it handles Chrome and word processors. And altogether, it's a 5th of the price.Not to mention on a monochrome TI-84+ you can also get it connected to a breadboard with a 2.5mm jack which you can get a whole set of for $5, and the calc itself goes for like $70 on eBay. So that's half the price to also get a TI-84+ that can connect to a breadboard and you can code with and also have the ability to use Z80 assembly for much faster code, and TI-BASIC for safer code if you want to just toy around with it.That's really my biggest issue with this thing. It's just too expensive. And that also means that there's not much of a community around this thing, even through the magic of the internet it's hard to find anyone else who's actually written programs for this thing. If this thing was like $20, hell yeah! I'd recommend it to anyone with a TI-84+CE! But at $64?? Eh... probably not.If you don't already own a TI-84+CE, I'd say definitely do NOT get it. Getting both the calc and the Innovator Hub is waaaaaay more expensive than just getting a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino. You could even deck out your Pi with an external touch screen, speakers, and buy a whole bunch of breadboards and hardware components for the price of this.If you do own a TI-84+CE, I'd say it's a fun toy to play around with. I definitely could see this is a good educational tool as well. I've not had any issues with it, it's built pretty solidly, and is very responsive. I'd have to say, though, the instructions suck, it barely explains how to do anything and I had to figure out a lot of its features on my own.I don't think this is a bad gadget by any means. I just think the price tag is a bit unreasonable for what you get. I'd only recommend it to people who not only already own a TI-84+CE specifically, but also REALLY want to do this kind of specifically on their TI-84+CE.I also don't get why they couldn't make it backwards compatible with the other TI-84+'s. It's obviously possible, they have USB ports too. If you charge ridiculous prices for your calculators, people aren't going to upgrade for a long long time, so to me, not supporting the old calcs just seems like a slightly dirty move to try and get people to upgrade. Given how much they're charging, they clearly could afford to add some backwards compatibility. I like Texas Instruments calcs, I own 5 of them, but this thing only works on literally 1 of them.But like I said before, don't feel like you need to upgrade your old TI-84+ to this one just to get these features. There are plenty of online tutorials how you can easily hook a all the TI-84+'s or even the TI-83+'s to a breadboard and code it with TI-BASIC or Z80 Assembly as well.