Tutorials

This may be an off-the-wall question, but am I the only one who thinks the "Tutorial" section of the site should be merged into the playground? It seems to me that it's just one more place to have information segmented.

I like the idea of having a "tutorial" page that takes new users through progressive steps, but it seems to me the individual topics should link to Playground entries.

Or is it just me?
Tim

It's a good idea, especially because there's so much great information on the playground. My thought would be to leave the examples on the main site (because they need to be in sync with the distribution and don't change that often), but use the playground (Arduino Playground - Tutorials) for the tutorials. We could have two entries in the sidebar: one for "Examples" and one for "Tutorials".

How does that sound?

mellis,

I understand the need to keep the small "core" set of examples under your control, so that you can easily verify with 100% certainty that they work and are the same examples distributed with the arduino.

The only reason I brought this up was because of this thread where someone was having problems with the LiquidCrystal library (he's not the first person to have the same question either). I wanted to fix it so that nobody has the same problem anymore, but it's in the Tutorials section.

To answer your question, it seems to me that pretty much everything in the right-hand column of the tutorials page should be moved to the playground.

Thanks for listening!
Tim

I agree. It would be nice to make them update-able by anyone, especially since we've not done a very good job of it. I'll work on this, probably starting with an email to the developers list to see if anyone objects or has suggestions.

Hi,
moving the tutorials into the playground is a good idea, but I think the playgorund needs some kind of cleanup too.
Navigating among the different sections on the right panel gets more confusing all the time.
Like there is the entry "Standalone 3.3v 8Mhz" in the Tutorial section. What does someone new to the arduino expect to read here?
The distinction between CodeLibrary and ConnectingHardware is also not very clear.
I wrote a libray for controling a LedMatrix. Does that belong into the hardware-section, or the library-section?
For a start I suggest to implement a more tree-like navigation, with only a few links like tutorial/hardware/IDE/etc.
which links into another index of a subsection.
There is actually no need to have a direct link to the LedMatrix-Lib from the main page like it is now.

Another suggestion would be a playground-section in the forums.
There are sometimes articles I would like to comment on or discuss with others. (Actually there are some articles I would like to see beeing deleted, because there is no content at all):
Maybe this "playground-forum" would encourage people to ask questions, request changes etc. in a easy manner.

Eberhard

I wrote a libray for controling a LedMatrix. Does that belong into the hardware-section, or the library-section?

I'd say that the library should be under the library section.
A page showing how to make a Led Matrix would be under hardware.

Another suggestion would be a playground-section in the forums.

The forums need a overhaul imho.
They are laid out very weirdly.

What do you suggest?

What do you suggest?

SparkFun has a logical forum layout.

E.g. A forum for announcing/asking help on Projects, code snippets, hardware help, software help, coding help.

Imho the forums should be divided by purpose, not type.
E.g. hardware and software trouble shooting should be in the same category.

Just my opinion of course. :slight_smile:

Interesting suggestions. I can see how it might make sense to merge the hardware and software versions of the troubleshooting, bugs & suggestions, and development forums. I think the hardware and software interfacing topics are pretty different, even though they have the same name. Still, combining some of the other forums could "make room" for splitting up the hardware interfacing forum into a few different subject-based forums (e.g. "Motion & Motors", "Sound", "Light & Displays", "Sensing & Input"), which is something I think would be useful. What do you think?

These changes probably won't happen quickly, but I'll definitely continue to mull them over, and they'll probably happen one of these days.