Passing of fellow french TI calculator community member Romain "roms" Liévin
Posted by Xavier on 16 February 2025, 18:12 GMT
Today, we're carrying the sad news of the passing of Romain "roms" Liévin. It was relayed by François "mmu_man" Revol.
In this TI graphing calculators community, Romain was especially an instrumental part of the Linux Programmers Group, which brought the community pieces of libre, portable software (usually working on Linux, BSDs, macOS and Windows) for communicating with and emulating the TI graphing calculators we've come to love: libticonv, libtifiles(2), libticables(2), libticalcs(2), and their better-known TILP (II), TIEmu and TilEm front-ends respectively. The ability to communicate with (almost) the entire lineup of TI graphing calculators through a single, unified API, in its second iteration, is unmatched.
In 2007, he visited TI EdTech in Dallas, picking up a variety of calculators and cables to aid in further development of the communication libraries. TI doesn't want to invest in porting their software to Linux and the BSDs, and does usually no longer provide documentation, but helps select persons with hardware donations. Even to this day, few members of the user community had such a level of interaction with persons on TI's payroll.
Professionally, Romain was teaching some aspects of computer science and physics, and had additionally undertaken a PhD.
I met him several times over the years, and picked up his set of calculators and cables in 2010, in order to carry forward the maintenance and evolution of the LPG stack, mostly working on the libraries. A nice and smart person, with a good long-term vision for the community. It showed in decisions such as requiring that some features remain optional in TIEmu; this enabled TIEmu to remain usable into the 2020s with minimal maintenance, so despite the slight additional complexity it brought, time has now shown that it was the right way forward.
mmu_man will keep the memories from him at the engineering school, where we were young and technology was cool and interesting. That's when he remembers him smiling.
Article written by Lionel Debroux with a tribute of François "mmu_man" Revol.
