Them and us.

Hi, I am new to the forum, having spent a few days looking thro what others have used the forum for, I think it may be very good for learning. However I am concerned that often a reply likes to state that the poster is too good to help the poser. Sometimes making very poor remarks about the poser and making fun of the poor person simply asking for help.
Another moan, well I might as well while I can, is very good projects are on the web, but I do wish the writer could put the date, IDE, and actual library version used. I recently spent hours working on a sketch that wouldn't compile, only to find it was years old and out of date.
I look forward to learning more about Arduino.

Telalgar:
However I am concerned that often a reply likes to state that the poster is too good to help the poser.

Please post some links to the Threads in which that happened.

Expertise in computer programming and people-skills are not always found in the same body :slight_smile:

Focus on the advice rather than the style in which it is expressed.

And if you think someone has been rude to you be sure to say so in your subsequent Reply.

...R

I will take your points one by one.

Many of us are at fault in belittling users but please bear in mind that some questions are so often repeated and the answer is most often under the new users nose. All they had to do was the same as you appear to have done and read the top posts of a section and place thier question in the correct section with some reasonable information.
So many times it is a "me too" question tagged onto another post but often becomes a "nothing like the original"
That does build up as you see on occasion into "OMG NOT THIS AGAIN" type posts. We do our best but we can all suffer from a build up of intolerance. Most times I think we realise that and break ourselves free from it

Some pokes are meant in fun in the hope of getting a user to come forth with extra / better information. It is always a difficult thing to judge when it is appropriate...We can only read the words of the poster to see if they seem to be able to take a sly poke in jest. I agree we don't always get it right and occasionally sometimes it might come out the wrong way. We are simply humans here and none of us get paid for our time.

The web is littered with old and very very old projects but quite often it is still possible to use them in a lot of cases so long as you are generally using the same hardware. It is not uncommon to have to "TWEAK" older sketches and the section of the forum dedicated to that aspect and the people in there I think does a pretty fine job. Even older IDE's are available for download for such projects and the mainstay boards are also still widely available eg. UNO, NANO, LEONARDO etc.

Sorry if this sounds a little long winded but I wanted to be honest in my response.

EDIT. R2 also makes some good points...Try to take things as they are without trying to read too much into it.

ballscrewbob:
Many of us are at fault in belittling users

I don't think that is true. I certainly don't recall seeing you do it.

I agree with your other points.

...R

Sometimes Robin we dont see things simply because we are too close to them or they are or have become
the norm to us.
I am pretty sure almost all of us have done it to some degree somewhere.

Being able to see the trees is the way out of the forest...Or something like that.

Now I consider a typical side problem with forums. I have, indeed many thanks for, 4 entries after my comment.
The first two were relevant to my post, the remaining 2 were really between Robin 2 and Ballscrewbob were nothing to do with me.

I always considered myself a reasonable teacher, never minding repeating information to the next group of students. Hopefully all will have the same level of information in due course. (Probably teaching me more than I know in the end).

The examples that are given in the IDE do work, but in many show a combined, series of events. When trying to learn a simple approach to achieve the basics required would be welcome. Making it more involved to multiply the basics would then be fun and less frustrating for the user.

Again many thanks for the replies.

ballscrewbob:
Sometimes Robin we dont see things simply because we are too close to them or they are or have become
the norm to us.

I agree with that. But it is entirely different from "belittling users" which (to my mind anyway) implies an unpleasant intent.

...R

Telalgar:
I do wish the writer could put the date

This is one benefit of using projects hosted on GitHub (or the competing Git hosts). You can easily check the timeline of the entire development history of the project if you like. I often will restrict my searches to GitHub since I find the average quality of the projects hosted on that site are much better than ones found on some random website or Instructables.

Telalgar:
IDE

Yes, it is worth considering that, even with a recently updated project, you have no guarantee the author isn't using an outdated IDE version. A worse problem for me is the code I find that is advertised as "Arduino" but aren't actually compatible with the Arduino IDE because the author is using an alternative IDE/build system (usually PlatformIO). My opinion is that people should only call their code "Arduino" if it's compatible with the Arduino IDE.

All my public projects have continuous integration tests that compile with the latest IDE version, as well as significant previous releases. That is done for every commit as well as a scheduled automatic monthly build. Anyone browsing the repository can check the results of the latest tests and see which IDE versions were used so I'd consider that quite sufficient documentation. Yet another reason to prefer projects hosted on GitHub.

Telalgar:
and actual library version used.

I think that's a good suggestion. A big pet peeve of mine is projects that don't bother to document their library dependencies. Often I'm just trying to quickly submit a bug fix to the project or help someone to use it and hunting down the library dependencies can be the most time consuming part of the process when they weren't kind enough to provide documentation.

With a sketch, it might be worthwhile to bundle the library dependencies with the sketch in the src folder.

...and then there's the irritation felt by members when topics are posted in the wrong section, despite pretty clear admonishments not to.

(This thread was moved here from "Introductory tutorials")

Telalgar:
The examples that are given in the IDE do work, but in many show a combined, series of events. When trying to learn a simple approach to achieve the basics required would be welcome.

Assuming I understand you correctly, I've had the same thought with some of the examples. For example, I would have written the AnalogInOutSerial example something like this:

const byte analogInPin = A0;

void setup() {
  Serial.begin(9600);
}

void loop() {
  Serial.println(analogRead(analogInPin));
  delay(500);
}

That provides the most simple demonstration of analogRead() and it's actually a sketch you could find useful again and again, rather than only as a one-time learning experience. The official AnalogInOutSerial example unnecessarily complicates things with the use of map() and analogWrite().