i was searching for a simple RS485 protocol to play around with, mainly for educational reasons, when i found Nick's forum/tutorials. now, i knew it was there, but i guess i never paid much attention. i had thought the protocol was not compatible with the 485 transceiver chips i have, but upon looking closer at the datasheet, it will work.
now i just have to figure out a good educational project to learn the ins and outs of the library.
but the point of the post, all hail the guru's, like Nick, that take the time to provide tutorials, all while still helping us out in the forum.
I used to do my part to help out when i could, until i realized that at most times, i didn't always know as much as i thought i did. hence why i have fallen back to mostly hang out in the bar.
I used to do my part to help out when i could, until i realized that at most times, i didn't always know as much as i thought i did.
The nice part about an active forum is that the people who know "some stuff" are fully capable of helping the people that know "less stuff", leaving more time for the people like Nick to write up the great tutorials and deal with the really hard questions. You just have to have a thick skin when someone who knows more than you "corrects" you. (although, I've also noticed that if you can get two near-experts ARGUING about some fine details of some subject, it can be very educational indeed!)
(This is a big problem is some of the "professional" forums run by semiconductor manufacturers. People who aren't real certain of their answers just don't help, and that frequently means that you don't get ANY useful answers. Because the number of people working at a semiconductor company that are actually experts on any subject can be pretty small, and the people assigned to answer forum posts may not have the best (or even very good) answers...)
(It was a big wake-up call back when I was programming professionally. We had some early "customer engineers" who were ... pretty clueless. And yet, they would latch on to a customer problem and bug us development engineers until we provided an explanation or solution to the customer, so they were very useful. (At least, if the company is willing to let the customer engineers bug the development engineers. This tends to be something that falls away as companies grow.))
hence why i have fallen back to mostly hang out in the bar.