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|bug|status-completed|favicon|site-design| | 2 | Halp! The favicon is faceless! | <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/5fZKM.jpg" alt="enter image description here"></p>
<p>I have a Retina display, and the favicon is faceless, plain, and depressing everywhere I go. Can we please fix this?</p>
<p>Easy Repro Steps:</p>
<ol>
<li>Open Chrome (haven't tested it on anything else)</li>
<li>Zoom in (command-<kbd>+</kbd> on a Mac) to 200%</li>
<li>Go to Arduino.SE</li>
<li>Observe the facelessness of the icon.</li>
</ol>
| <p>I'm getting the same issue in <a href="http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/8489/arduino">chat</a> without a retina display.</p>
<p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/l8i16.png" alt="no icon"></p>
<p>The root of the problem appears to be different than what Shadow points out since it's pulling from a <a href="http://cdn.sstatic.net/arduino/img/favicon.ico?v=abcdef" rel="nofollow noreferrer">different location</a>:</p>
<pre><code><img class="small-site-logo" title="Arduino" alt="Arduino" width="16" height="16" src="http://cdn.sstatic.net/arduino/img/favicon.ico?v=abcdef">
</code></pre>
<p><img src="http://cdn.sstatic.net/arduino/img/favicon.ico?v=abcdef" alt="icon"></p>
| 2014-02-12T00:17:51.227 |
|discussion|status-completed|tags|tag-synonyms| | 3 | Using board names as tags | <p>Given that the site's focus area is Arduino, creating tags such <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/arduino-uno" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'arduino-uno'" rel="tag">arduino-uno</a> does not seem to me, as ideal. I think that just the board name without Arduino prefixed to it is sufficient, as the Arduino in the name is implicit.</p>
<p>So, should tags be of the form <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/arduino-boardname" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'arduino-boardname'" rel="tag">arduino-boardname</a> or simply <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/boardname" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'boardname'" rel="tag">boardname</a>? Eg, <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/arduino-uno" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'arduino-uno'" rel="tag">arduino-uno</a> vs <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/uno" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'uno'" rel="tag">uno</a></p>
| <p>Based on the answers given (Thanks @Butzke!), I felt it prudent to create a tag list of sorts for all the official boards. Feel free to add any missing board with the desirable tag name. If you disagree with any of the tag names, please mention so in a comment.</p>
<ul>
<li>Uno - <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/uno" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'uno'" rel="tag">uno</a></li>
<li>Leonardo - <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/leonardo" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'leonardo'" rel="tag">leonardo</a></li>
<li>Due - <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/due" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'due'" rel="tag">due</a></li>
<li>Yún - <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/yun" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'yun'" rel="tag">yun</a></li>
<li>Tre - <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tre" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'tre'" rel="tag">tre</a></li>
<li>Micro - <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/arduino-micro" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'arduino-micro'" rel="tag">arduino-micro</a></li>
<li>Robot - <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/arduino-robot" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'arduino-robot'" rel="tag">arduino-robot</a></li>
<li>Esplora - <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/esplora" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'esplora'" rel="tag">esplora</a></li>
<li>Mega - <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mega" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'mega'" rel="tag">mega</a></li>
<li>Ethernet - <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/arduino-ethernet" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'arduino-ethernet'" rel="tag">arduino-ethernet</a></li>
<li>Mega 2560 - <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/mega-2560" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'mega-2560'" rel="tag">mega-2560</a></li>
<li>Mini - <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/arduino-mini" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'arduino-mini'" rel="tag">arduino-mini</a></li>
<li>Arduino Pro - <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/arduino-pro" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'arduino-pro'" rel="tag">arduino-pro</a></li>
</ul>
<p>All variations of the board name will be synonimized eg. <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/arduino-uno" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'arduino-uno'" rel="tag">arduino-uno</a> will map to <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/uno" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'uno'" rel="tag">uno</a>. This list is for the tags that will be <em>visible</em> to users eg. <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/uno" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'uno'" rel="tag">uno</a>, once the synonym is established. </p>
| 2014-02-12T03:00:03.660 |
|discussion|tags| | 10 | How should board revisions be handled? | <p>The boards undergo significant changes across revisions. Is there a need to create separate tags for the different revisions or should we just specify the revision in the question without having separate tags?</p>
<p>The Uno for example underwent multiple changes going from R2 to R3 such as a new microcontroller(Atmega 32 from 16) as well as switching of the FTDI board with a Atmega 16. So, it is possible that many questions relevant for R2 may be obsolete with regard to R3.</p>
| <p>Given my understanding of the target audience here, revisions shouldn't be reflected in tags. </p>
<p>Only if the revision is germane to the answer/question should it be raised; No need to force people to try to understand what revision they have just to tag a question.</p>
| 2014-02-12T05:01:19.607 |
|discussion|site-scope| | 15 | Are clone-specific questions on topic for this site? | <p>There are a lot of different Arduino clones of varying quality on the market. Obviously they are mostly equivalent to the standard ones, so hopefully the majority of questions should be widely applicable.</p>
<p>However, there may be cases where a clone's features, layout, and/or spec deviate from the norm, whether by mistake or by design.</p>
<p>Should this site include questions which relate to specific clones, or would that be off-topic?</p>
| <p>[Terminology note: in this answer I'm using the word "clone" as the original poster used it; most of the devices he and I are discussing would be called "derivatives" in the <a href="https://blog.arduino.cc/2013/07/10/send-in-the-clones/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Arduino taxonomy</a>.]</p>
<p>Yes, clones are absolutely on topic. "Arduino" most often refers not to specific hardware devices but the ecosystem that allows people easily to play with a lot of different hardware and software, usually (<a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/command-line">but not always</a>) using the Arduino IDE. Much as "PCs" quickly evolved to a general set of platforms with a lot of characteristics in common rather than a specific set of machines built by IBM, Arduino from the beginning, with opening of the specifications and designs, been aimed at this; the <a href="https://www.arduino.cc/en/Guide/Introduction" rel="nofollow noreferrer">official introduction</a> states:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>All Arduino boards are completely open-source, empowering users to build them independently and eventually adapt them to their particular needs.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The commitment of both Arduino (the company) and the semi-official (SparkFun, AdaFruit) and unofficial community to this is demonstrated by:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Standalone" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Instructions for building a clone</a>* on the official Arduino site itself.</li>
<li>Different form factors both <a href="https://store.arduino.cc/product/A000005" rel="nofollow noreferrer">official</a> and <a href="https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14083" rel="nofollow noreferrer">unofficial</a>.</li>
<li>Microcontrollers ranging from slightly <a href="https://store.arduino.cc/product/A000069" rel="nofollow noreferrer">(ATmegta2560)</a> to moderately <a href="http://digistump.com/wiki/digispark" rel="nofollow noreferrer">(ATtiny)</a> to rather <a href="https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/esp32-thing-hookup-guide#installing-the-esp32-arduino-core" rel="nofollow noreferrer">(ESP32)</a> to greatly <a href="https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardZero" rel="nofollow noreferrer">(ARM Cortex)</a> different.</li>
<li>Libraries offering similar functionality amongst <a href="https://www.arduino.cc/en/Reference/SoftwareSerial" rel="nofollow noreferrer">official releases</a>, <a href="http://arduiniana.org/libraries/newsoftserial/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">unoffical libraries</a> that become official, and <a href="http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_libs_AltSoftSerial.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">other unofficial libraries</a> that are suggested in official library documentation as alternatives.</li>
</ul>
<p>I personally think one of the most beautiful projects I've even seen in the the Ardunio SE is <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/a/30694/31794">Nick Gammon's torch locator</a>, which involves nothing at all found on <code>arduino.cc</code> except the IDE, yet shows so much of the spirit of what Arduino is: useful real-world interaction, a good smidgen of hobbyist-level EE knowledge (the analysis of the expected lifetime), and "we don't need no ARM CPU running Linux to do this." (The original question also hits many of these points, too, particularly with the novel application.)</p>
<p>Arduino has always been about experimentation and playing with not just the official things supplied by Arduino itself but with almost anything anybody can make that can be fit into the ecosystem. "Clones," made for many different reasons, and ranging from almost exact copies to very different things, are clearly a part of that.</p>
| 2014-02-12T10:47:42.527 |
|discussion|site-scope|content-quality| | 16 | When should questions be considered shopping recommendations? | <p>I just found this question: <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/91/is-there-a-color-lcd-display-for-an-arduino">Is there a color LCD display for an arduino?</a> Should it be considered a shopping recommendation?</p>
| <p>I totally agree with Robert, but I wanted to add something:</p>
<p>It is important to note that Arduino.SE is <em>nearly</em> unique among the entire StackExchange network, as it revolves around a fairly extensive <strong><em>product line</em></strong> rather than an <strong><em>area of study/work</em></strong>. (We share this "unique" spot with LEGO.SE and RaspberryPi.SE.)</p>
<p>Since we are focusing on a concrete product, <em>some</em> questions that would be considered "shopping" on other SE sites should not considered as such on this site.</p>
<p>(My two cents...)</p>
| 2014-02-12T13:08:05.023 |
|discussion|site-scope| | 22 | Is it OK to ask questions about "Arduino compatible" micros (not clones)? | <p>There are many Arduino compatible micros and derivatives. I'm thinking specifically here of the <a href="https://www.spark.io/" rel="nofollow">Spark Core</a>.</p>
<p>It's not a clone, but uses the Arduino Sketch language and is wi-fi IoT oriented.</p>
<p>Are question related to Arduino compatible devices applicable here?</p>
| <p>Yes. Arduino has encouraged derivative hardware from the start. In the <a href="https://www.arduino.cc/en/Guide/Introduction" rel="nofollow noreferrer">introduction on the official site</a> they say:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>All Arduino boards are completely open-source, empowering users to build them independently and eventually adapt them to their particular needs.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>(The above is taken from <a href="https://arduino.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2436/31794">this answer</a>.)</p>
| 2014-02-12T14:02:38.863 |
|discussion|site-scope| | 59 | What should our "policy" be for questions that wouldn't survive on EE but aren't exactly fit for this site? | <p>I recently posted <em><a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/273/when-should-i-use-a-transistor-mosfet-and-when-should-i-use-a-relay?noredirect=1#comment394_273">When should I use a transistor, mosfet, and when should I use a relay?</a></em> to see how the community would react. (Only 3 views so far so not really a big reaction yet, as you can see.) Here's the controversy:</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>Why it should stay here (obviously my own opinions here, add yours in the comments):</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>That person would get outrageous downvotes from EE members because it is a simple question</li>
<li>This site is for <em>beginners</em> and trying to get them to use Stack Exchange</li>
<li>EE might refuse to answer it</li>
<li>It still is applicable (if they do ask how to control it)</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Why it should be migrated:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>It doesn't have to do much with Arduino besides if someone asks <em>"How do I control it with Arduino"</em></li>
<li>There would be overlap with EE.SE</li>
</ul>
<hr>
<p>The number of reasons for keeping it outnumbers the migrating, but those two reasons are very big. I doubt that the Stack Exchange team wants us creating duplicate sites with much overlap: it may be a matter of time until advanced questions start coming up here.</p>
<p>I do know that this is similar to other questions on meta but no real policy of on-the-fence questions has been established. <strong>What do you think we should do? How can we prevent this from happening on a daily basis if they aren't fit for Arduino.SE?</strong></p>
| <h3>We are looking at this wrong.</h3>
<p>This question <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/273/when-should-i-use-a-transistor-mosfet-and-when-should-i-use-a-relay?noredirect=1#comment394_273">When should I use a transistor, mosfet, and when should I use a relay?</a> clearly shows knowledge on the part of the OP of basic EE and is not entirely relevant to Arduinos in the way it is phrased. It should either be re-written, migrated, or closed.</p>
<p>How a <em>beginner</em> to Arduino-verse would ask the same question is:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I am trying to control A with Arduino B. The power requirements for A are this but B provides something else. How do I control B using A without burning out A?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Or</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The control current for A seems far higher than the safe value of B. What method can I use to throttle the current and/or control the current input to B through A?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In either of these cases, the question highlights that the OP has <strong>a problem</strong>, has <em>maybe</em> <strong>tried to solve it</strong>, and most likely <strong>lacks the <em>specific</em> knowledge or terminology</strong> to reach the solution to the problem themselves without a nudge in the right direction.</p>
<p>These questions, and <em>this audience</em>, is one of the reasons that this site is up and I feel we should keep such questions within our scope. The usual restrictions of basic research, clear problem and progress made should be applied and questions found lacking should be closed. The level of difficulty should not solely be a parameter on the basis of which questions should be closed.</p>
| 2014-02-17T16:19:23.857 |
|discussion|site-scope|content-quality| | 65 | Should we ban "how to hack XYZ" from our site? | <p>I can picture questions like this popping up everywhere:</p>
<ul>
<li>How do I hack a treadmill?</li>
<li>How do I hack my alarm clock?</li>
<li>How do I hack my garage door opener?</li>
</ul>
<p>Some of those things aren't really <em>meant</em> to be hacked. We already have one question like this: <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/269">Using the Waspmote Sensor Board</a>. It isn't that bad alone, but questions like this could add up and really clutter our site.</p>
<p>The treadmill is already on EE (answered my me). Some devices that use AC shouldn't really be messed with, especially from users who don't even know that it is dangerous, or how to do it in the first place. However, I do believe that some of these "hacking questions" may be useful. For example, should we allow, "How do I simulate pressing a physical push button on a PCB?" <strong>What should we do about this?</strong></p>
<p><strong>Edit:</strong> After a while, questions like this seem to have died down. This doesn't seem like a problem now.</p>
| <p>The example questions you give are poor examples of the kinds of questions we want to see on the site and should not be allowed.</p>
<p>Questions should ask something specific. Like this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>How can I log the distance and time from my treadmill to an SD card using an Arduino?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There are two parts to this question:</p>
<ul>
<li>How do I interface my treadmill with Arduino?</li>
<li>How do I log data to SD card with Arduino?</li>
</ul>
<p>We can clearly help with the second question.</p>
<p>The first part of the question may or may not be off topic, depending on how much detail the person has provided (schematics, datasheets), what kind of effort they've put into solving the problem themselves, and the scope of the problem.</p>
<p>tl;dr: it depends on the question. Maybe we can answer part of it and another part is better for another site on the SE network.</p>
| 2014-02-19T01:44:07.890 |
|discussion|site-scope| | 68 | Are questions asking for libraries on-topic? | <p>We have questions such as <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/233/are-there-any-good-and-maintained-libraries-for-using-ds2482-i2c-to-1-wire-bridg">this one</a> on the site right now. My gut feeling (coming from Stack Overflow) is that such questions are off-topic. <em>However</em>, I feel as if these questions aren't really broad (not as many libraries exist for Arduino as say Javascript). I feel that if these questions are specifically scoped, they are okay to ask on here. However, since we are still in private beta, is this a question we really want modeled for public beta? Are these questions on-topic here?</p>
| <h2>I do believe that they should be allowed.</h2>
<p>Arduino is a <strong><em>line of products and their accessories.</em></strong> (Also with their code.) SO is different here. Some users are even pushing allowing shopping questions. This is very similar to a shopping recommendation.</p>
<p>I say that we leave it for now. If it becomes a problem that it becomes <em>only</em> finding libraries, then the moderators implemented by then will have to clean up the problem before it grows. It may seem like a nuisance, but I do believe that if we can attract another user this way, it can only help us. Plus, there are only a limited number of libraries available out their. I've noticed a pattern with Arduino that people tend to create similar projects.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>My gut feeling (coming from Stack Overflow) is that such questions are off-topic. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Remember, this isn't SO. We were given a canvas by Stack Exchange to build our site the way we want it. The sites tend to follow a pattern, but if all of the sites were practically the same, there would be no need to open up another site. From some work on different sites, each community is different. If it will serve us good, why should we not do it just because Stack Overflow doesn't?</p>
| 2014-02-20T00:10:55.957 |
|discussion| | 84 | Support for UDOO & Integrated Arduino Boards | <p>Should we support tags of specific boards like the UDOO & Raspberry Pi? While a Raspberry Pi is different from an Arduino, the UDOO essentially is an Arduino Due and LInux Quad-core computer integrated into one device with shared processor communication. With that being said currently the UDOO has some issues with their IDE that doesn't allow certain Arduino Due related things to work properly. One of the main issues currently is that floats compile, but don't work properly on the Due and just crash the board.</p>
| <p>I don't think most UDOO questions are on topic here... Unless the question is related to only the Arduino part of the system. If you can replace UDOO with Arduino in the question and it still makes sense, then it'd be on topic.</p>
<p>Problems with the UDOO IDE are totally off topic. If we allow people to ask any UDOO related questions, we will surely see some of those, but we can mark them as off topic, no problem.</p>
| 2014-02-24T16:34:02.187 |
|discussion| | 88 | How to handle bad language? | <p>I've noticed a couple of instances of minor profanity on the site, mainly in comments. It's not been directed at anyone, nor has it been particularly vulgar. However, it's definitely into territory which some people would consider somewhat offensive, or at least unprofessional.</p>
<p>How should we respond to instances like these?</p>
| <p>The relevant documentation on this is confusing at best.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/help/behavior">behaviour page</a> has the notice: <code>Please note that expletives are not allowed. If you use expletives on this site, you may be issued a warning or a suspension.</code></p>
<p>However, the <code>may be issued a warning or a suspension.</code> portion of the page is a direct link to a <a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/22232/are-expletives-allowed-on-se-sites">meta question</a> about "profanity" on stack-exchange in general that directly disagrees with the linking text. In response to the question <code>Are expletives allowed on SE sites?</code>, the highest-voted answer is <code>Yes, but keep them to a minimum</code>. </p>
<p>As far as I can tell, I would assume the behaviour page is out of date, since it seems the community consensus disagrees with it.</p>
| 2014-02-26T12:52:22.077 |
|bug|reputation|users-page| | 93 | User reputation leagues broken? | <p>It looks to me as if the user reputation leagues are broken. To access them, one would go to the <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/users">user list</a> and hit the link labelled "<em>weekly / monthly / quarterly reputation leagues</em>" at the bottom.</p>
<p>Is that something that should already work at this point in time, or only once the Arduino SE community becomes a permanent one?</p>
| <p>The reputation leagues are now up and running.</p>
<p><a href="http://stackexchange.com/leagues/288/week/arduino/">http://stackexchange.com/leagues/288/week/arduino/</a></p>
| 2014-02-26T20:01:24.960 |
|discussion| | 102 | When to close a question or to give it a chance? | <p>I was reading this question (<a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/q/484/46">Arduino as USB HID</a>) and was surprised that it already had two votes to close as being off-topic only after a few minutes of being asked.</p>
<p>I started discussing with @AsheeshR that although I would agreed that the question is in the frontier of being on/off topic, we should give it a chance as it someone knowledgeable could add facts that could reveal that the question is on-topic.</p>
<p>I just thoght that we are repeating the same mistakes as SE.EE (<a href="https://electronics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3354/why-close-this-question-instead-of-editting-it-to-make-it-on-topic">see my related question there</a>), which sometimes compulsively try to quickly close on-topic questions. </p>
<p>Although putting a question on-hold is a useful quality assurance tool, I think it was misused in this particular example, as putting a question on hold also discourages knowledgeable people from answering it, and I would like very much to know the answer to it even if the answer is just what you are saying (on the windows side).</p>
<p>Instead of voting for closing, the reviewers could have edited or answered the question so that us readers would understand better why the question isn't related to Arduinos and why it's being closed. That would have been much more constructive than voting for closing it. </p>
<p>So, my general question is: <strong>Where should we draw the line for closing votes in this particular case?</strong></p>
| <p>I won't come as a newbie on a forum and give lessons to the people who built it, but that question, should not be closed because of what it is asking, because what it asks is definitely possible using AVR only code, cf my <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/484/arduino-as-usb-hid#comment845_484">comment</a>.</p>
<p>I guess I'd need to do a little bit of research on how to guide the OP on actually implementing that, because I guess most of the people doing USB HID devices use the leonardo, not the uno.</p>
<p>The only thing that would be wrong about the question, is how it looks like, and maybe encourage the OP to edit and improve it by giving him <em>time</em> and <em>advices</em>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In this specific example, I really can't see how this is "on the line". The question is specifically asking how to develop a software layer on Windows to utilize input being sent using the serial connection. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>it's actually not, only part 1 of the question is, but part 2 of the question is open to suggestions.</p>
<blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>we should give it a chance as it someone knowledgeable could add facts that could reveal that the question is on-topic.
Yes, there is. But the OP is not interested in trying that out, as is clearly mentioned in the comments. </p>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<p>the OP only said in the comments that he is <em>afraid</em> of flashing using DFU because he may brick his stuff. That's because he does not know he can actually build a cheap ISP board using another arduino to reflash it in case everything gets wrong!</p>
<blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>[...]
A question about Windows APIs would best be answered on Windows development forums. That is not a question for Arduino.SE</p>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<p>though the OP asks whether it's possible to do it using Windows stuff, wouldn't it be the role of an Arduino community to tell him that he actually can do using the Arduino hardware and no windows code? Which would make that an even better solution, as it would be portable!</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I explained albeit in few words, as to why the question was off-topic. I do not think this was at all a problem in this case.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I do not agree a question <em>that <strong>definitely</strong> has an answer</em> should be put on hold for one week in a few minutes after posting. If I could, I'd definitely vote for <code>reopen</code>, and guide the OP to understand what's wrong in his question.</p>
<p>Question closing/holding/rerouting is for keeping the knowledge base sane by keeping track of dupes, moving questions where people might get an answer or delete questions that are offending or just totally un-answerable.</p>
<p>That question applies to non of those cases, it can be answered and is definitely interesting for future readers of the forum.</p>
<p>HTH</p>
| 2014-02-27T16:13:49.003 |
|discussion|events| | 115 | What should we do for Arduino Day 2014? | <p>From the <a href="http://day.arduino.cc/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">official Arduino site</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Arduino Day is a worldwide celebration of Arduino’s first 10 years. It's 24 hours full of events – both official and independent, anywhere around the world – where people interested in Arduino can meet, share their experiences, and learn more.</p>
<p>Who can participate?<br>
Arduino invites all Arduino user groups, makerspaces, hackerspaces, fablabs, associations, teachers, pros, and newbies to participate. Let’s make this the biggest birthday party yet!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Arduino Day is on the 29<sup>th</sup> of March. What can we do to join in on the worldwide event?</p>
| <p>Partner with Instructibles.com. The people there are CRAZY for the Arduino!</p>
| 2014-03-01T12:01:51.453 |
|discussion|site-promotion| | 117 | What should we do with the Arduino.cc promotion link? | <p>A while ago, when i proposed this site, i put up a link on the <a href="http://playground.arduino.cc/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Arduino playground</a> to the Area 51 proposal of Arduino:</p>
<p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/bEgRJ.png" alt="arduino.cc sidebar"></p>
<p>Now that we're public, should i change it to link to he actual site? Should i delete it entirely?</p>
<p><strong>Note:</strong> i will make the necessary changes once we arrive at a conclusion.</p>
| <p>AskUbuntu was launched by Stack Exchange and Canonical and is now linked to prominently from the top bar of Ubuntu.com</p>
<p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/1Oyh6.png" alt=""></p>
<p>Ask Ubuntu is also linked to from the installation GUI. This is beneficial for the site as it generates a lot of traffic. </p>
<p>I think we should also aim for more visibility within the Arduino platform.</p>
<p>We should be here:
<img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/UxjSC.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>
<p>Also, if you open the Arduino IDE, it links back to Arduino.cc from the Help menu. We should be there as well, alongside Arduino.cc</p>
<p>Both of these however, are more long term goals, and will most likely require the support of Stack Exchange, due to Arduino trademark issues.</p>
| 2014-03-02T00:30:41.357 |
|discussion| | 123 | Can we get a way to accent Yún? | <h2>The Arduino Yún board, has an accent in it's name.</h2>
<p>Unless you're using a modified/Spanish/Italian keyboard, it's hard to add the accent. It obviously isn't a huge deal, but I thought it might be something to think about. Could we:</p>
<ul>
<li>Just ignore it? (Note: I didn't tag it <a href="/questions/tagged/feature-request" class="post-tag required-tag" title="show questions tagged 'feature-request'" rel="tag">feature-request</a> if we wanted to ignore it)</li>
<li>Add an accent symbol on the toolbar?</li>
<li>Have some sort of script that automatically renames the instances of "Yun"</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/kcPrU.png" alt="Toolbar screenshot"></p>
<h2>Technically, we're misspelling a board's name on purpose. Is this even a big deal?</h2>
| <p>I wonder if HTML entities like <code>&uacute;</code> pruduce Yún in stackexchange markdown? ... it seems they do.</p>
<p>This is handy if you have a tenkeyless keyboard or can't remember decimal numbers for every accented character.</p>
| 2014-03-04T03:24:24.093 |
|feature-request|status-completed|favicon| | 141 | Could we get a more interesting favicon? | <p>Some SE sites in beta have <em>slightly</em> customized favicons. They are motifs instead of letters, like for example <a href="https://poker.stackexchange.com/">Poker</a> and <a href="https://chess.stackexchange.com/">Chess</a>. I think 'AR' doesn't really relate to the site. Could it be changed to something like this?</p>
<p>Generic Infinity Symbol</p>
<p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/Fmf7F.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>
<p>or the Official Arduino <a href="http://arduino.cc/en/Trademark/CommunityLogo#.Uxsnsx-BVWM" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Community Logo</a> </p>
<p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/mTdfc.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>
<p>or the official logo itself (This is trademarked by Arduino)</p>
<p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/iEznj.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>
| <p>I'm a little late to the party here. Perhaps I should have created a new meta discussion.</p>
<p>I was part of the first(?) Arduino.SE closed beta which was eventually merged into EE and SO. This was the favicon I created for that purpose. Licensed under the <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License</a>. If that license is incompatible with what we do here at Arduino.SE, I'll gladly make an exception. For the record, I haven't determined if the 16x16 likeness of the Arduino Uno is actually something I can license.</p>
<p>Three different versions each having consecutively fewer components:</p>
<p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/CUsk7.png" alt="enter image description here">
<img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/mH6pD.png" alt="enter image description here">
<img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/DbxiG.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>
<p>A preview of the first:</p>
<p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/Vbv7a.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>
<p>Hopefully someone will find these useful.</p>
| 2014-03-08T14:27:30.080 |
|bug|status-completed|favicon| | 149 | New favicon doesn't show up in many places | <p>We got a <a href="https://arduino.meta.stackexchange.com/a/145/37">new favicon</a> almost two days ago that looks like an infinity symbol. Unfortunately, this isn't showing up in a lot of places, including the dropdown:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/BPQbU.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>
</blockquote>
<p>chat (including the icon on the tab):</p>
<blockquote>
<p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/RT5YJ.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>
</blockquote>
<p>and pretty much everywhere on <a href="http://stackexchange.com">http://stackexchange.com</a>, e.g. <a href="http://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#newest">here</a>.</p>
<p>This is 100% reproducible on Chrome, Firefox, and IE on two different computers, one of which hasn't even been to Arduino.SE before. I very highly doubt this is a caching problem.</p>
| <p>Our sprite maps and favicons were out of date. Fixed in build rev <code>2014.3.17.1464</code>. </p>
<p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/K08te.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>
| 2014-03-15T12:59:35.840 |
|discussion|moderation| | 151 | Should moderators be censors? | <p>Yesterday I have seen <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/221/what-can-i-do-if-i-run-out-of-flash-memory-or-sram/239#239">one of my posts</a> deleted by one moderator with one comment to justify deletion.</p>
<p>I don't deny the justification for deletion (my post was little more than a link to a very good reference URL).</p>
<p><strong>HOWEVER</strong>, there was no prior notification or warning, hence I was given no chance to improve my post before deletion.</p>
<p>Since I could still access it, I did perform edits on this answer, but it looks definately deleted, is that correct?</p>
<p>Hence my question: should we accept that our moderators exercize censorship so easily, and without any prior warning?</p>
<p>Shouldn't there be <strong>rules of conduct</strong> for moderators regarding censorship? </p>
<p>For example, I have seen a few answers with rather rude language being there for long before being edited, and I did not understand why moderators took so long to edit it (I had myself commented to the poster that he should edit his post, which he clearly did not care about). </p>
<p>A problem I see with such beahvior is that, if moderators start getting too keen on easy-going censorship, then I doubt the site will be able to keep its participants for long.</p>
<p>Indeed, it is important to keep in mind that Stack Exchange sites are here for people to help each other, and this is "best effort", some people just don't have enough time to write lengthy answers with all details but feel they can still help with their "simple" answers.</p>
| <p>In the interest of openness, I would like to say that I had flagged the answer as NAA based on an accepted policy for link only answers that holds across the network. I completely agree with the moderator action taken in this case and I do not think there was any overreach here. The problems on letting poor content stay up are far more severe, than the effort that may go into an early deletion and undeletion after improvement.</p>
<p>I flagged it after giving it 12-18 hours, which would have been sufficient time in my opinion to go back and write a proper post. In any case, you are a 6k user on Stack Overflow, so I expect that you would be aware that such answers are considered very low quality and are in general not-acceptable. A recent post by <a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/225370/200868">Shog on MSO</a>, reiterates the same.</p>
<p>Moreover, there is an answer draft feature available. Any answers that you are working get automatically saved by the SE editor every 45 seconds. If you intend to improve on an answer later, type a draft, work on it, and then post it when it has sufficient content to qualify as an answer.</p>
<p>I don't mean to be harsh, but <strong>there is no excuse for posting poor content</strong>, especially if it doesn't even live up to very basic quality standards. If you were extremely pressed for time, and yet wanted to help (as all of us do), then you could have posted your "answer" as a comment, and later come back and formed a proper answer, or let someone else develop an answer based on your findings. After all, <em>the intention</em> is to generate and share knowledge, and that would easily be served this way as well.</p>
| 2014-03-16T09:26:12.060 |
|discussion| | 163 | Are there any guidelines/limitations for someone that promotes the company he works in? | <p>I noticed today <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/a/849/470">this reply</a> which seemed like a biicode promotion, and after checking the user profile I saw <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/a/848/470">another answer</a> referring to the same company.</p>
<p>A look in the profile details of the user showed that she is working for the specific company, and based on the fact that her only two replies are referring to his company I wonder if there are rules regarding the issue of promoting a company.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Software Engineer at biicode</p>
</blockquote>
<p>and in the <a href="http://about.me/hithwen" rel="nofollow noreferrer">linked website</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>I'm Julia S.Simon and I'm currently working at biicode.</p>
<p>Biicode is a spanish startup that aims to lower entry barriers for
programmers making the hard stuff onf configuring project,
dependencies and build for them.</p>
<p>Contact me if you need more information, or visit us and try it for
free!</p>
</blockquote>
| <p>While I cannot see the answers at present, in my experience of moderation over the past year, I have seen that sometimes people really don't know about Stack Exchange policies on self promotions. They are genuinely trying to answer the question, and an answer sometimes does happen to be an off-site resource being developed by the OP. As long as the post isn't blatant spam ("Buy handbags CHEAP HERE!!") and is an attempt to answer the question, the first response should be to comment and then delete with the not an answer flag. </p>
<p>Also, note that the <strong>spam flag</strong> comes with many network wide restrictions on the user account, along with a -100 penalty, so it <strong>should not be used lightly</strong> and certainly not be used for something that could be considered a valid attempt to answer, albeit poorly written or sounding like an advertisement.</p>
| 2014-03-20T18:00:44.897 |
|discussion|site-scope|content-quality|closed-questions| | 188 | When does a question ask for too much information/too specific, making it useful to a limited number of users? | <p>This Arduino SE community has a more laid back scope than most sites. We have a fair number of shopping questions, which aren't allowed on most other sites. However, <strong>that doesn't mean that we shouldn't close a question if it's asking for too much information.</strong> I don't mind helping people out, but I hate when a question gets focused on such a small audience that it's only useful to the OP and one other person.</p>
<p>For example, <em><a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/1126/creating-a-wireless-remote">Creating a wireless remote</a></em> was asked a few minutes ago. Should we refuse these questions and require the OP to break them down into smaller groups? It's asking about:</p>
<ul>
<li>Does this board fit my needs?</li>
<li>What should I use for Bluetooth?</li>
<li>How would I code this?</li>
</ul>
<p>That seems like it's useful to only one person: the OP. I feel the OP has good intentions, but we don't want to get a lot of questions that are this specific. I personally feel that this should be closed and then either split or edited by the OP to focus the question. I didn't want to close it because I felt that closing this might spark a little controversy, and I wanted to get the community's input.</p>
<p><strong>How should we handle this?</strong> I don't know if all of the parts would be a good fit for our site, but I don't know how to really tell the OP that in a nice way. They need help, but this doesn't seem to fit the theme of other SE sites. Should we allow this type of question on our site? It would help gain newbies, but other sites have abandoned this practice for practical reasons a long time ago. However, it seems like we need to allow some of this type of question so we don't "scare" off new users.</p>
<p>Another question that might have a limited audience is specific board recommendations. IMHO the consensus was that you can't which board would fit [insert purpose], but you can ask what differences between boards.</p>
<h2>Edit:</h2>
<p><strong>There's no debate if that question should be closed.</strong> It needs to be broken up. What I really want to discuss here is <strong>if such open ended questions would be good for the site.</strong> We shouldn't leave them open <em>just to get more questions</em>. If we feel these types of questions, such as "would this board be good for my purpose?", would be constructive then they should be left. I, personally think they are too specific, and the how to ask page even says to make it applicable to more than one or two people. Like I said earlier, I want to know what <strong>the community thinks</strong> (and document the policy here if any confusion were to arise.)</p>
| <p>I've used SE for some time now, but only signed up when the Arduino section was established. In my opinion there is the official Arduino site which caters for the advice and recommendations type of question, and SE has built up it's reputation by being a straight forward Q&A site. Look at the 'Hot Network' questions down the right hand side of the screen, all precise questions and not a lot of latitude (embellishment maybe) with the answers they will receive. </p>
| 2014-04-09T02:00:19.507 |
|bug|status-completed| | 191 | Why isn't our Twitter account tweeting? | <p>So we have a Twitter account, <a href="http://twitter.com/StackArduino" rel="nofollow">@StackArduino</a>. However, it hasn't tweeted, has no profile picture, and isn't linked to anywhere. Why is this, and can the account be "activated"?</p>
| <p>Ah, that would ultimately be an oopsie on our end. We had it configured properly (yay), but almost immediately something happened to un-configure it (ugh), and we didn't re-configure it (d'oh). It has just been fixed, and should be working soon!</p>
| 2014-04-13T16:38:17.827 |
|discussion|status-completed|tags| | 193 | Do something about [optimisation] tag? | <p>I just noticed the <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/optimisation" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'optimisation'" rel="tag">optimisation</a> tag, and two possible problems with it.</p>
<ol>
<li>"Optimization" is <a href="https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=optimization,optimisation&year_start=1950&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=0&share=&direct_url=t1;,optimization;,c0;.t1;,optimisation;,c0" rel="nofollow noreferrer">far more common</a> than "optimisation" in both <a href="https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=optimization,optimisation&year_start=1950&year_end=2000&corpus=17&smoothing=0&share=&direct_url=t1;,optimization;,c0;.t1;,optimisation;,c0" rel="nofollow noreferrer">American English</a> and <a href="https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=optimization,optimisation&year_start=1950&year_end=2000&corpus=18&smoothing=0&share=&direct_url=t1;,optimization;,c0;.t1;,optimisation;,c0" rel="nofollow noreferrer">British English</a>, so it should probably be <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/optimization" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'optimization'" rel="tag">optimization</a> instead of <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/optimisation" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'optimisation'" rel="tag">optimisation</a>.</li>
<li>It is vague. In this case it was used for code optimization, but it could be used for for energy use optimization, circuit simplicity optimization, etc.</li>
</ol>
<p>What should we do with this tag?</p>
| <p><strong>Now it's <a href="/questions/tagged/status-completed" class="post-tag moderator-tag" title="show questions tagged 'status-completed'" rel="tag">status-completed</a>.</strong></p>
<p><em>Changes:</em></p>
<ul>
<li>Edited question and renamed to <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/code-optimization" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'code-optimization'" rel="tag">code-optimization</a></li>
<li>Added synonyms: <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/code-optimisation" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'code-optimisation'" rel="tag">code-optimisation</a> → <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/code-optimization" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'code-optimization'" rel="tag">code-optimization</a></li>
</ul>
<p>I've declined to do anything with the vague <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/optimization" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'optimization'" rel="tag">optimization</a> tag. Since the question was edited, it's an orphaned tag. If there's another type of optimization that comes up (i.e. energy), we can change add synonyms for the different spellings.</p>
<p>The reason for that is if I would've added <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/optimisation" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'optimisation'" rel="tag">optimisation</a> → <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/code-optimization" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'code-optimization'" rel="tag">code-optimization</a> and <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/optimization" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'optimization'" rel="tag">optimization</a> → <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/code-optimization" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'code-optimization'" rel="tag">code-optimization</a>, any time a user adds either of those tags, it will, <strong>without warning,</strong> replace the tag to <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/code-optimization" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'code-optimization'" rel="tag">code-optimization</a>. IMHO this is a major flaw in the system. It should warn the user.</p>
<p>A quick note: from searches, it seems like spelling it with a <code>z</code> is the most common way, but is still widely used. However, since SE is a US based company, we'll stick to US spelling. I know that Stack Exchange has users and countless countries, but it's simpler to stick to one version of English spelling, the one that's built into the engine/code base.</p>
| 2014-04-16T18:23:54.000 |
|feature-request|status-completed|tags| | 212 | Wire tag vs. wires tag | <p><a href="http://arduino.cc/en/reference/wire" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Wire</a> is useful. "Wires" as a tag is not. I've edited the question that has <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/wires" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'wires'" rel="tag">wires</a> and removed it (admittedly its replacement, <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/wiring" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'wiring'" rel="tag">wiring</a>, is <a href="http://wiring.org.co/" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><em>almost</em> as bad a choice</a>) but I still can't attach <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/wire" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'wire'" rel="tag">wire</a> to <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/1633/arduino-master-slave-pins">a question about Wire</a>. I believe someone may need to nuke <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/wires" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'wires'" rel="tag">wires</a> directly, but is there any way to prevent this from happening in the future?</p>
| <p>No one really can nuke <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/wires" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'wires'" rel="tag">wires</a>. There is a system background process that is ran daily that cleans up tags without any questions.</p>
<ul>
<li>Tag it <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/wire-library" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'wire-library'" rel="tag">wire-library</a> so you can get it past the system (and it's much less ambiguous)</li>
</ul>
<p>As far as what to do to prevent this from happening, I did this this:</p>
<ul>
<li>Synonymize <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/wires" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'wires'" rel="tag">wires</a> ← <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/wiring" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'wiring'" rel="tag">wiring</a>, because someone wouldn't type "wiring" when referring to the library. The system will automatically rename everything tagged "wiring" to "wires."</li>
</ul>
<p>This way, if someone types wires or wiring, they will get wiring. If they type wire, it will have an option for "wire-library" and "wiring." This will fix the problem.</p>
<p>We should leave <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/wire" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'wire'" rel="tag">wire</a> alone. It's way to ambiguous to be synonymized to one of the two types of wire.</p>
| 2014-05-22T23:47:31.727 |
|discussion|status-completed|site-scope| | 218 | Redesigning Help Docs/Tour - Part Two: Full Site Scope Definition | <p><em>This post is on behalf of all of the mods.</em></p>
<p>This is designed to be a sequel to this post:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em><a href="https://arduino.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/159/lets-customize-our-tour-section">Let's customize our tour section!</a></em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>To be a successful Stack Exchange site, we not only have to ask good question and have a good user base, we need to make it easy for new users to grow our community. The easiest way to do this is with help documents and other <a href="/questions/tagged/faq" class="post-tag moderator-tag" title="show questions tagged 'faq'" rel="tag">faq</a> posts on meta.</p>
<p>The biggest problem (besides question quality) is off topic questions. Site scope is fairly easy for most people, but there are a couple of grey areas that are complicated for me. I can't imagine how confusing it must be for a new user when asking a question in this 'grey area' <em>and</em> learning SE's policies on duplicates, accepting, comments, and scope in general.</p>
<p>Moderators have special tools for edtiting certain parts of the site. We can edit the tour (as specified in the "part one") and <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic">one page of the help center</a>. Here's what it says:</p>
<blockquote>
<h2>What topics can I ask about here?</h2>
<p>Please <a href="/search">look around</a> to see if your question has been asked before. It’s also OK to <a href="/helpcenter/self-answer">ask and answer your own question</a>.</p>
<p>If your question is not specifically on-topic for Arduino Stack Exchange, it may be on topic for another Stack Exchange site. If no site currently exists that will accept your question, you may <a href="http://area51.stackexchange.com/faq">commit to</a> or <a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/76974/how-can-i-propose-a-new-site">propose</a> a new site at <a href="http://area51.stackexchange.com/">Area51</a>, the place where new Stack Exchange communities are democratically created.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That's the standard cookie-cutter template. It's not really that descriptive. I think we should preserve it, or reword it. it seems to be a </p>
<p>The following is a draft of what we should change the help center to. You can submit an answer if you would like to suggesting changes. I'm no wordsmith myself, but us three mods feel it's pretty good. You can also suggest other things to add (a meta link would be fine with a little text) or, if you disagree with a bullet, feel free to either: a.) post an answer or b.) ask another question on meta and link it.</p>
<hr>
<p>Before you post a question, please <a href="/search">look around $SiteName</a> to see if your question has been asked before. If you've already asked this on another site, please don't ask it again. Either flag it for moderator attention and request migration to $SiteName or delete it on the other site and re-ask it here. Also note that it’s okay to <a href="/helpcenter/self-answer">ask and answer your own question</a>.</p>
<p>Here at $SiteName we have specific criteria to determine if a question is fit for our site. If after reviewing the following list you're still not sure, visit Meta $SiteName, a site to ask about $SiteName.</p>
<h1>On topic:</h1>
<ul>
<li><strong>Specific questions about Arduino boards, code, and the Arduino IDE</strong>. Feel free to ask about anything related to Arduino.</li>
<li><strong>Questions about other IDEs, clones/counterfeits/derivatives, and other coding languages for Arduino</strong>. Feel free to ask about any language for coding Arduino.</li>
<li><strong>Board recommendations</strong>. Make sure to include detailed information about the project you are doing and your requirements. If your question is too vague, it may be put on hold.</li>
<li><strong>Library recommendations</strong>. Make sure to include detailed information about the requirements. If your question is too vague, it may be put on hold.</li>
<li><strong>Code review:</strong> Use the tag <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/project-critique" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'project-critique'" rel="tag">project-critique</a> for advice on how to improve your code/project.</li>
</ul>
<h1>Off topic:</h1>
<ul>
<li><strong>General Coding:</strong> If your question is about coding not related to Arduino, try <a href="http://stackoverflow.com">Stack Overflow</a>.</li>
<ul>
<li>If the solution would be the same with or without Arduino, then it's usually a general coding question.</li>
</ul>
<li><strong>General Electronics:</strong> If your question is about making electronics or other electricity questions not related to Arduino, try <a href="http://electronics.stackexchange.com">Electrical Engineering</a>.</li>
<ul>
<li>If knowledge of Arduino would improve a question, it's on topic. Otherwise, it might not be a great fit for our site.</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<p>If your question is not specifically on-topic for $SiteName, it may be on topic for another Stack Exchange site. If no site currently exists that will accept your question, you may <a href="http://area51.stackexchange.com/faq">commit to</a> or <a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/76974/how-can-i-propose-a-new-site">propose</a> a new site at <a href="http://area51.stackexchange.com/">Area51</a>, the place of where new Stack Exchange communities are democratically created.</p>
| <p><strong>Upvote this if you agree that we should change it to the draft posted (original post).</strong></p>
<p><strong>Downvote this if you agree that we should <em>not</em> change it to the draft posted (original post).</strong></p>
<p><em>This is just a community wiki post designed to get an unbiased consensus of what you think we should do. Some people might upvote the main post just because they agree that it should be changed, but want a revised version. If you disagree, either add another answer <strong>or</strong> vote on an existing answer to bring up why you want it to be changed. If any major edits are made, I'll delete and recreate this post so we can reset the vote.</em></p>
| 2014-06-08T16:32:13.857 |
|discussion|site-scope| | 1220 | Questionable question: book recommendation | <p>I just came across <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/q/3514/37">this</a> question:</p>
<blockquote>
<h2>Can anyone tell me the best books for studying UAV?</h2>
<p>It's kind of hard to get full guide from the internet. I just wanna buy a book for UAV guide. I gotta make DIY drones. I'd appreciat it if you recommend good books.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>and I honestly don't know what to do with it. Is it a good question, deserving of upvotes? Should I Downvote it? Delete it? Close it? What should It be closed with?</p>
| <p>The most obvious point I see is that it's not about Arduino. A UAV could certainly involve one or more Arduinos, but it sounds like most of the relevant subject matter is more general than that. The best course of action seems like closing it, with the potential to re-open if it's made more Arduino-specific.</p>
<p>That issue notwithstanding, I'd say it's also too broad at the moment, and possibly too opinion-based. It seems a shame to close questions like that, because it could genuinely be interesting and helpful to many people. However, it's not what Stack Exchange is designed for. We want questions and answers which address specific, tangible issues.</p>
| 2014-07-30T14:55:18.017 |
|discussion|support| | 1225 | What to do with my question which contained a wrong premise, as shown later? | <p>I have asked a question:</p>
<p><a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/3638/what-happens-to-the-sketch-memory-when-arduino-is-powered-off">What happens to the sketch / memory when Arduino is powered off?</a></p>
<p>In one comment a likely solution was found (DS18B20 returns 85 deg C after power up), which mostly turns the question moot. The question did not contain enough details (it did not mention at all DS18B20), it was "loaded" with my assumption the issue is with the Arduino memory.</p>
<p>I am not sure what to do with the question now. Should I delete it completely, or is there some way to salvage it - to edit it so that it contains enough detail so that the solution related to DS18B20 is more apparent? Or should I keep it, as it is, as even in current form it is not that bad, and ask a new question about DS18B20 after reset behaviour?</p>
| <blockquote>
<p>Should I delete it completely[...]?</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>No.</strong> <em>Technically, you cannot delete it since there are answers.</em></p>
<p>First of all, <strong>do you have your question solved?</strong> If so, accept an answer/post an answer/comment, upvote the answers, and move on with your life. If no, then edit it. You're just adding some small details...</p>
<p>If you're worried about the existing answer, I'd say maybe add a comment if you feel like you should. It's still a valid answer to the question, although it didn't exactly solve it. It <em>did</em> tell you that a normal board should be fine and that it is something else.</p>
<p>I think adding a new question would attract a lot of similar answers.</p>
| 2014-08-11T09:51:02.940 |
|discussion|site-evaluation| | 1229 | Let's get critical: Aug 2014 Site Self-Evaluation | <p>We all love <a href="http://arduino.stackexchange.com">Arduino Stack Exchange</a>, but there is a whole world of people out there who need answers to their questions and don't even know that this site exists. When they arrive from Google, what will their first impression be? Let's try to look at this site through the eyes of someone who's never seen it before, and see how we stack up against the rest of the 'Net.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/review/site-eval">Site Self-Evaluation review queue</a> is open and populated with 10 questions that were asked and answered in the last quarter.
Run a few Google searches to see how easy they are to find and compare the answers we have with the information available on other sites.</p>
<p>Rating the questions is only a part of the puzzle, though. Do you see a pattern of questions that should have been closed but are not? Questions or answers that could use an edit? Anything that's going really well? <strong>Post an answer below to share your thoughts</strong> and discuss these questions and the site's health with your fellow users!</p>
| <h1>Final Results</h1>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/3440/mcu-type-atmega16u2-not-avaliable-in-eclipse-avr-plugin">MCU Type ATmega16U2 not avaliable in Eclipse AVR Plugin</a></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Net Score: 6</strong> (Excellent: 6, Satisfactory: 1, Needs Improvement: 0)</p>
<hr />
<ul>
<li><a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/3424/how-to-use-two-sonars">How to use two Sonar's</a></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Net Score: 4</strong> (Excellent: 5, Satisfactory: 2, Needs Improvement: 1)</p>
<hr />
<ul>
<li><a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/3182/what-is-the-frequency-of-pwm-output-on-arduino">What is the frequency of PWM output on Arduino</a></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Net Score: 4</strong> (Excellent: 5, Satisfactory: 1, Needs Improvement: 1)</p>
<hr />
<ul>
<li><a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/3345/is-programming-the-attiny85-possible-in-1-5">Is programming the ATTiny85 possible in 1.5?</a></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Net Score: 2</strong> (Excellent: 3, Satisfactory: 5, Needs Improvement: 1)</p>
<hr />
<ul>
<li><a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/3294/disable-boot-flash-completely-on-atmega">Disable Boot Flash completely on ATMega</a></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Net Score: 1</strong> (Excellent: 2, Satisfactory: 5, Needs Improvement: 1)</p>
<hr />
<ul>
<li><a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/3203/how-can-i-make-my-arduino-code-work">How can I make my Arduino code work?</a></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Net Score: 1</strong> (Excellent: 2, Satisfactory: 5, Needs Improvement: 1)</p>
<hr />
<ul>
<li><a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/3286/nrf24l01-rf24-radio-with-arduino-micro">nRF24L01+ (RF24) radio with Arduino Micro</a></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Net Score: 0</strong> (Excellent: 2, Satisfactory: 3, Needs Improvement: 2)</p>
<hr />
<ul>
<li><a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/3357/arduino-uno-usb-not-recognized">Arduino UNO USB not recognized</a></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Net Score: 0</strong> (Excellent: 0, Satisfactory: 3, Needs Improvement: 0)</p>
<hr />
<ul>
<li><a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/3422/can-i-control-analog-io-pins-using-yun-linux">Can I control analog IO pins using Yun Linux</a></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Net Score: -1</strong> (Excellent: 2, Satisfactory: 2, Needs Improvement: 3)</p>
<hr />
<ul>
<li><a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/3164/need-some-help-with-controlling-a-fan-through-pwm">Need some help with controlling a fan through PWM</a></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Net Score: -1</strong> (Excellent: 1, Satisfactory: 2, Needs Improvement: 2)</p>
<hr />
| 2014-08-26T03:01:21.323 |
|discussion|site-design|tagging| | 1237 | Can we modify the highlighted questions color? | <p>I found pretty difficult to distinguish between an highlighted and a non-highlighted question on the Arduino site. Is it just me?</p>
<p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/a0Uce.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>
| <p>Unfortunately we can't change that. All Stack Exchange sites use the same design during their beta phase. If/when we graduate to a full site, we'll get a custom design.</p>
<p>With that said, the difference between highlighted and non-highlighted seems reasonably clear to me. Perhaps you need to adjust some display settings on your system?</p>
<p>Alternatively, you could use a browser add-on which lets you write a script to modify the design automatically on-the-fly (e.g. GreaseMonkey).</p>
| 2015-01-08T16:22:51.547 |
|discussion|site-evaluation| | 1250 | Let's get critical: Feb 2015 Site Self-Evaluation | <p>We all love <a href="http://arduino.stackexchange.com">Arduino Stack Exchange</a>, but there is a whole world of people out there who need answers to their questions and don't even know that this site exists. When they arrive from Google, what will their first impression be? Let's try to look at this site through the eyes of someone who's never seen it before, and see how we stack up against the rest of the 'Net.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/review/site-eval">Site Self-Evaluation review queue</a> is open and populated with 10 questions that were asked and answered in the last quarter.
Run a few Google searches to see how easy they are to find and compare the answers we have with the information available on other sites.</p>
<p>Rating the questions is only a part of the puzzle, though. Do you see a pattern of questions that should have been closed but are not? Questions or answers that could use an edit? Anything that's going really well? <strong>Post an answer below to share your thoughts</strong> and discuss these questions and the site's health with your fellow users!</p>
| <h1>Final Results</h1>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/8185/increasing-payload-size-above-32-bytes-using-nrf24l01">Increasing payload size above 32 bytes using nRF24L01+</a></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Net Score: 6</strong> (Excellent: 6, Satisfactory: 2, Needs Improvement: 0)</p>
<hr>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/6737/can-i-use-the-setup-function-inside-the-loop-function">Can I use the setup() function inside the loop() function</a></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Net Score: 5</strong> (Excellent: 5, Satisfactory: 2, Needs Improvement: 0)</p>
<hr>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/6683/serial-debug-output-looking-messy">Serial debug output looking messy</a></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Net Score: 0</strong> (Excellent: 1, Satisfactory: 3, Needs Improvement: 1)</p>
<hr>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/6714/5-switches-1-ai-pin">5 Switches 1 AI pin</a></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Net Score: 0</strong> (Excellent: 1, Satisfactory: 1, Needs Improvement: 1)</p>
<hr>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/6846/how-to-send-json-to-a-webservice-from-pc-rpi-with-live-data-from-arduinoserial">How to send Json to a webservice from pc/RPI with live data from Arduino(serial)</a></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Net Score: 0</strong> (Excellent: 1, Satisfactory: 1, Needs Improvement: 1)</p>
<hr>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/6715/audio-frequency-white-noise-generation-using-arduino-mini-pro">Audio Frequency White Noise generation using Arduino Mini Pro</a></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Net Score: -2</strong> (Excellent: 1, Satisfactory: 3, Needs Improvement: 3)</p>
<hr>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/8025/get-the-distance-to-non-perpendicular-surface">Get the distance to non perpendicular surface</a></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Net Score: -2</strong> (Excellent: 0, Satisfactory: 2, Needs Improvement: 2)</p>
<hr>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/8120/wake-up-atmel-328-with-external-interrupt">Wake up atmel-328 with external interrupt.</a></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Net Score: -4</strong> (Excellent: 0, Satisfactory: 0, Needs Improvement: 4)</p>
<hr>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/6679/servo-motor-swinging-back-to-0%c2%b0">Servo motor swinging back to 0°</a></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Net Score: -5</strong> (Excellent: 0, Satisfactory: 3, Needs Improvement: 5)</p>
<hr>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/6736/read-temperature-ds18b20-with-the-attiny85">Read temperature (DS18B20) with the ATTiny85</a></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Net Score: -5</strong> (Excellent: 0, Satisfactory: 1, Needs Improvement: 5)</p>
<hr>
| 2015-02-22T03:02:37.810 |
|support|bounty| | 1256 | Featured Questions | <p>There is no section saying 'Featured Questions' in the 'Unanswered Questions Tab'.
How do I find those questions that have active bounties on them?</p>
| <p>The "Featured" tab only appears if there are featured questions to show. Currently, I don't think we have any active bounties, which is why the tab isn't there.</p>
<p>Also, as far as I know, the tab appears on the main home page and under "Questions". It doesn't appear in the "Unanswered questions" section.</p>
| 2015-04-15T11:20:21.843 |
|discussion| | 1258 | Questions with no concrete answer? | <p>Let's say I want to create a robot to follow a line, but make this as fast as possible. </p>
<p>Can I actually ask a question like: "How can I make a line following robot as fast as possible".</p>
<p>I would say that the question is way too broad, but what if I really were wondering this or wanted to discuss about it? And it's not really an answer which has a 'solution' but more a discussion/design question. Can this be asked on SE?</p>
<p>Should I:</p>
<ul>
<li>Just ask the question, it's a good question?</li>
<li>Not bother SE people with design questions, just try it out yourself, if you get stuck, come back here.</li>
<li>Not bother SE people with design questions, just try it out yourself and ask a question if you have to further optimilize something like: "How to read sensors faster?"</li>
<li>Divide it in smaller/more basic (and probably design) questions: "Which motor is fastest (servo/DC)?", "How to make a fast (line-follow) robot chassis? (maybe not for arduino SE)" and "How to use 'PID' controlling in arduino"</li>
<li>Do more research before asking said question </li>
</ul>
| <p>An answer doesn't have to be concrete, but it should be at least a "lightly packed gravel" answer. As for your question, you're walking on the line. If you put a ton of research into your question, figure out most of the parts of the design, and ask a well-written question about the parts you cannot figure out, it's probably not going to be closed. However, if you just add two sentences to the body, it's a lot more likely to be closed. The point is, we cannot tell if your question is too broad without seeing it.</p>
<p><strong>What do I do then?</strong> Let's break it down. First, figure out your design objectives. You're never going to achieve the <em>fastest</em>, so figure out how fast is good enough. How much can you spend? How big will this be? Will it have any cargo or other sensors?</p>
<p>Then, let's look at a bit more specific stuff:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Chassis:</strong> Steel? Plastic? Wood? <em>Candy canes?</em> Look at your tools and resources and pick that out. This is essential in how much this will weigh</li>
<li><strong>Sensor System:</strong> Do you have the budget for an array of sensors so you can build better algorithms? How will you mount them? How fast can you sample them?</li>
<li><strong>Motors:</strong> How will you drive them? How will you power them? Servo, stepper, or brushed? Closed or open loop feedback?</li>
<li><strong>Board:</strong> How many things do you need to attach? Power usage constraints? How will you communicate with it? Do you need an ARM board?</li>
</ul>
<p>You get the point. If you didn't specify enough information, I could tell you to try one of <strong><a href="http://rockettestgroup.org/meeting/37/DM3%20Static%20Test.jpg" rel="nofollow">these</a></strong> if you don't specify, and I doubt that you want to attach something explosive to your Arduino! :)</p>
<p>The thing is, design questions are <strong>really</strong> hard to answer and they take a long time to get answered. If you put the time into your question, people will be a lot more willing to answer and you're a lot less likely to get your question closed. Furthermore, you get more specific answers that're more useful to you and you get a sense of pride when you realize that you designed most of this without any help. Just remember: we're here to help you along the way, not do everything for you.</p>
| 2015-04-20T13:00:32.430 |
|discussion|content-quality|users|new-users| | 1264 | How to attract highly skilled / knowledgeable users to Arduino.SE (instead of EE.SE or SO) | <p>Before I started to tinker with Arduino some months ago, I was already a heavy-user of StackOverflow (I am a professional programmer) and at times EE (home-made electronics now and then has been a hobby for almost twenty years).</p>
<p>As such, when I started the Arduino think I was glad to find out there is an Arduino SE, and looked for some some questions and their answers here, and even asked some myself.</p>
<p>Two things that I notice are:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>The quality of the answers seems to be quite <em>lower</em> than answers you would get from EE or SO with a similar or identical question;</p>
</li>
<li><p>Virtually any question you could ask here could be answer with minimal modifications at one of the two other SE sites. They even have, as already noted elsewhere, very active "arduino" tags. If I'm not mistaken, I have already asked here and, due to lack of convergence, re-asked at SO and quickly got a good answer.</p>
<p>I believe this happens because there is a relatively high availability of specialized "software guys" or "hardware guys" in each of the other sites, so answers come quick and have good quality. On the other hand, if I was to consider myself an "(sort of) advanced" SE user, I could say I was, say "disappointed" with the results I got, and preferred to stick to the well-beaten path of SO for software or EE for hardware.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>So, question would be:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Should Arduino SE make anything to attract interested power-users from SO and EE? And what could be done in that direction?</p>
</blockquote>
| <p>Fundamentally, the way to get skilled and knowledgeable posters to answers Arduino questions <strong>is to discontinue this site</strong> and put those questions back where they belong and where - as you have observed - there are already pools of knowledgeable people to answer them.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the existence of this site serves as an excuse for dumping questions from more appropriate settings such as Stack Overflow and Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange, even when the details of those questions are far, far more appropriate to the respective subject areas of those sites. The test is simple - if a question would belong had it mentioned some other MCU or embedded evaluation platform, then fundamentally it still belongs even if it mentions an Arduino, and pretending otherwise is just uselessly fragmenting things.</p>
<p>Apart from oddities of the IDE and the like, there are few problems that are uniquely Arduino - rather, most issues that come up are classic ones encountered across the whole of embedded, programming, and electronics work. Flush a question to the "Arduino backwater" and you can't get help from the person who solved <strong>the same problem</strong> on a PIC or ARM last week, nor can an answer contributed in the ATmega/Arduino context to an obscure site help someone solve the same problem on a different chip next week in the way it could if posted to the site that handles that topic for all other contexts. </p>
<p>The solution is not to segregate the Arduino questions, but rather to push back against the bigots in certain communities, work with posters to improve the quality of questions asked in their natural and appropriate settings when the initial posts aren't complete enough to answer, and do our best to make sure that questions get useful, technically sound, and <em>transferable</em> answers. A lot of questions here aren't even about Arduino at all - but rather about peripherals that could be used with any processor.</p>
<p>Hiding the Arduino stuff on this backwater of a site does none of the above - instead, it means that Arduino questions get few answers, often containing glaring technical errors, and it allows the bad behavior on other sites to continue unchallenged.</p>
| 2015-05-28T19:38:14.543 |
|discussion| | 1267 | Where to announce/discuss stuff? | <p>I've just received an email from the microsoft insider program, where they spotlight windows 10 IoT support for Arduino</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We’re also excited to announce our partnership with Arduino, making Windows 10 the world’s first Arduino-certified operating system. Learn more about Windows Remote Arduino and Windows Virtual Shields for Arduino and get started here.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>^Sorry for not having the links in it.</p>
<p>Is there anywhere on Arduino Stack Exchange to announce this? I was tempted to create a question as announcement, as I think it's quite interesting for everyone who's busy with arduino. I'm not sure if announcing it in chat will do.
I found that there are little chat-rooms on the site. Is this a topic worth a chatroom? And will the chatroom stay even if everyone leaves it for a moment?</p>
| <p>The blockquote you included in your question reads to me like part of an advertisement, so there's really not a good place for it on this site. If that's not the message you want to spread (i.e. if I'm misunderstanding what you mean by "announcement"), please let me know.</p>
<p>You are of course welcome to ask questions on the main site about Arduino/Windows 10 integration when the time comes.</p>
<p>To answer your procedural question, chat content never goes away, although it can get soft-deleted just like Q&A posts or remain visible in a read-only state. For more info, see <a href="http://chat.stackexchange.com/faq#retention">the chat FAQ</a>.</p>
| 2015-06-12T13:47:00.297 |
|discussion| | 1277 | I answer a question, and then the OP deletes the question. Grrr |
<p>I saw a question about an hour ago, it looked reasonable. It was about passing an array of values to a function. I answered it, it took 10 or 15 minutes, including making up some example code.</p>
<p>Half an hour later I go to check on whether I made any typos, but couldn't find any history of the question at all! Not even in the "moderator tools" list of deleted questions (ie. "recently deleted").</p>
<hr>
<p>It wasn't listed in my "all actions":</p>
<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/GbMWn.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/GbMWn.png" alt="Recent actions"></a></p>
<hr>
<p>I was starting to doubt my sanity at this point. I'm sure I answered it! I even have the code in my IDE:</p>
<pre class="lang-C++ prettyprint-override"><code>class myClass {
const int num_;
const int * values_;
public:
// constructor
myClass (const int num, const int * values) : num_ (num), values_ (values) { }
// other stuff here
// demo
void printThem ();
}; // end of class myClass
void myClass::printThem ()
{
for (int i = 0; i < num_; i++)
Serial.println (values_ [i]);
} // end of myClass::printThem
const int NUMBER_OF_VALUES = 6;
const int myValues [NUMBER_OF_VALUES] = { 22, 33, 44, 55, 66, 77 };
// make an instance of the class with the wanted values
myClass foo (NUMBER_OF_VALUES, myValues);
void setup ()
{
Serial.begin (115200);
Serial.println ();
foo.printThem ();
} // end of setup
void loop ()
{
} // end of loop
</code></pre>
<hr>
<p>So, did I dream it? Did I answer a question that came to me in a vision?</p>
<p>I couldn't find any trace of it, until I remembered the browser history:</p>
<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/PgOLi.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/PgOLi.png" alt="Question in my browser history"></a></p>
<p>There it was! The question <strong>did</strong> exist. Clicking on that link in the browser history revealed the question:</p>
<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/1K2yD.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/1K2yD.png" alt="Question, now deleted"></a></p>
<hr>
<p>And my answer:</p>
<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/TGrMD.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/TGrMD.png" alt="Answer to question"></a></p>
<p>Now I'm pretty pissed off. I've seen this sort of behaviour before on other sites, but I thought StackExchange was supposed to be a knowledge base of good questions and good answers. Not to get an answer and then delete the question <strong>and</strong> the answer.</p>
<hr>
<p>So what's my question? </p>
<ul>
<li>Is this acceptable behaviour? </li>
<li>How do you deal with people that ask a question, wait for you to answer it, and then delete the question?</li>
<li>Why is the answer not listed in "all actions"? I did an action. I answered a question. I expect that to be listed.</li>
<li>How can they even <strong>delete the answer</strong> as well? On the Arduino forum, if you delete your question the answer still stays there, and then a moderator tells the person not to do that again.</li>
</ul>
<hr>
<p>Moderators: Please undelete the question, undelete the answer, protect the question from further deletion, and have a word with the OP.</p>
| <blockquote>
<p>Is this acceptable behaviour?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yes and no. If there was a reason for deletion, it may be OK. However, there doesn't seem to be any reason the OP would delete. Otherwise, I'd say no. It's really dependent on the situation.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>How do you deal with people that ask a question, wait for you to answer it, and then delete the question?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Flag it for moderator attention.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Why is the answer not listed in "all actions"? I did an action. I answered a question. I expect that to be listed.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Deleted posts aren't listed in that section.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>How can they even delete the answer as well? On the Arduino forum, if you delete your question the answer still stays there, and then a moderator tells the person not to do that again.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We're not the Arduino forum, so there's that.</p>
<p>The OP can delete a question if it has only one answer with no upvotes (in this case they could delete)</p>
<hr>
<p>For now, I've undeleted the question/answer and left a comment to ensure that there isn't some lingering reason the OP wants the question deleted.</p>
| 2015-08-04T07:17:01.610 |
|discussion|site-scope| | 1279 | What would you think about broadening the topic to include Raspberry Pi, Robotics and Embedded Systems in general? | <p>I recently participated in the <a href="http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/70800/embedded-systems">Embedded Systems</a> private beta. It will be closing down next Friday, because there was not enough activity. In the meta post on the closing of the site, Andrew, a Robotics pro-temp moderator suggested that four beta sites are merged together to create one viable Embedded Systems site:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://arduino.stackexchange.com">Arduino</a> (542 days in beta)</li>
<li><a href="http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com">Raspberry Pi</a> (1151 days in beta)</li>
<li><a href="http://robotics.stackexchange.com">Robotics</a> (1018 days in beta)</li>
<li><a href="http://embedded.stackexchange.com">Embedded Systems</a> (10 days in beta, closing down)</li>
</ul>
<p>I collected some statistics from Area 51 for each beta (as of Aug 8, 2015):</p>
<pre><code>Site | Q : day | Answered | Users (200+ / 2K+ / 3K+) | A : Q | Visits / day
----------+---------+----------+--------------------------+-------+--------------
Arduino | 9.5 | 72% | 150 / 13 / 6 | 1.9 | 5106
Rasp. Pi | 11.9 | 82% | 438 / 24 / 17 | 1.8 | 21548
Robotics | 2.3 | 88% | 125 / 9 / 3 | 1.8 | 1516
Emb. Sys. | 7.7 | 85% | 24 / 0 / 0 | 1.6 | 80
</code></pre>
<p>Some numbers may be lower than normally due to summer holidays in the northern hemisphere.</p>
<p>Currently, Raspberry Pi seems to be the most viable, followed by Arduino. However, I think every site could be helped by a merge, because they have actually a lot in common.</p>
<ul>
<li>A search for "Arduino" on Raspberry Pi.SE yields 215 questions (2.6%), of which only 11 closed</li>
<li>A search for "Raspberry Pi" on Arduino.SE yields 71 questions (1.9%), of which only 3 closed</li>
<li>Robotics.SE most used tag is Arduino (208 Q). It also has a Raspberry-Pi tag (57 Q)</li>
<li>Raspberry Pi.SE has an Arduino tag (100 Q)</li>
<li>Arduino.SE has a robotics tag (35 Q)</li>
</ul>
<p>To illustrate the great overlap between these sites: I myself am a hobbyist and a computing science student. I own a Raspberry Pi and some other embedded systems like Particle's Photon. I also own I have worked with LEGO robots and Arduino. I have several modules that can be used with an Arduino which I use with PIC microcontrollers. I am currently working on a PIC32-based standalone text editor.</p>
<p>I do not think we would have many issues defining a scope which is distinguished enough from <a href="http://electronics.stackexchange.com">Electronics</a>, <a href="http://programmers.stackexchange.com">Programmers</a> or <a href="http://stackoverflow.com">Stack Overflow</a>. After all, your site and the others have been doing that already for quite some time. Think of the suggested merge as the <em>least common multiple</em> of the four sites.</p>
<p>I have looked through the questions on all four sites and have the impression that questions on many of these sites are of interest also to users on other sites. I'm most sceptical about Robotics.SE. Anyway, this overlap is what makes <em>me</em> think Andrew's suggestion might be a good idea. But what do I know? I'm not active on any of these sites!</p>
<p>So, <strong>what do you think? Would your community benefit of a merge with (some of) these sites?</strong></p>
<p><sub>Disclaimer: I do not know what SE, Inc. thinks about this. Polling the communities seemed a good idea to me.</sub></p>
<p><sub>I opened the same question on <a href="https://raspberrypi.meta.stackexchange.com/q/567/32161">Raspberry Pi Meta</a> and <a href="https://robotics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1281/10307">Robotics Meta</a>.</sub></p>
| <p>Personally I would vote <strong>not</strong> to, on the following grounds:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>On the figures quoted, the merged site would go from around 10 questions per day (here) to 30, however of those 30 only 10 would be relevant to people interested in Arduino. This effectively dilutes the number an Arduino-enthusiast could answer (percentage wise). There might be some cross-over (eg. from the Embedded Systems site) but I couldn't view it to check, because it was in closed beta.</p></li>
<li><p>I've found this site here (the Arduino one) quite friendly, and reasonably helpful to newbies. That is probably one of the reasons it needs to exist. The Arduino is <a href="https://www.arduino.cc/" rel="nofollow">marketed</a> as being <em>intended for anyone making interactive projects</em>. This is one of the reasons why I think a tolerance for beginners is important.</p></li>
<li><p>I've found <em>some</em> of the other StackExchange sites a little less friendly to newbies, with posts being closed within minutes of being made as off-topic, irrelevant, already answered, and so on.</p></li>
</ul>
<hr>
<p>Having said that, it looks like a merge between Embedded Systems and Robotics with this site would be the least disruptive, especially if the Robotics site normally talks about Arduinos.</p>
<p>I'm the least in favour of the Raspberry Pi being merged. It is a different processor, it uses a Unix operating system, and is generally quite different to an Arduino. Also, some of it is closed source, unlike the Arduino.</p>
<hr>
<p>An alternative would be to simply suggest to the (relatively small number of) users at Embedded Systems that they find a new home here.</p>
| 2015-08-08T09:43:38.333 |
|discussion|feature-request| | 1285 | Can we have a "OP does not respond to queries" close reason? | <p>Example question:</p>
<p><a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/10285/unexpected-timer-conflicts-uno">Unexpected Timer Conflicts (Uno)</a></p>
<p>Marked as unanswered. However a reply (later converted to a comment) asking for more information has been completely ignored.</p>
<p>How can this ever be answered if the OP does not post code? And for other posts if the OP does not state what Arduino they have?</p>
<hr>
<p>Suggest a "vote to close" reason: Clarification to question sought: none provided.</p>
<p>I'm guessing that a question that is months old, and getting no activity has been abandoned as "too hard" or answered elsewhere.</p>
<p>Meanwhile we get another "unanswered question" on our list.</p>
| <p>If there isn't enough information to answer the question then I think "Unclear what you're asking" is a suitable close reason.</p>
| 2015-08-21T23:37:41.720 |
|discussion|tags| | 2289 | Processing, signal-processing and text-processing tags | <p>Could we rename Processing (the language) tag to Processing-lang, and merge signal- and text-processing tags to data-processing tag. </p>
| <p>What does data-processing mean?</p>
<p>Although it's clear what <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/processing" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'processing'" rel="tag">processing</a> refers to -- and I agree with renaming that tag to clarify that it's about the <em>processing language</em> itself; tag <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/signal-processing" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'signal-processing'" rel="tag">signal-processing</a> and tag <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/text-processing" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'text-processing'" rel="tag">text-processing</a> don't have any usage guidance. I'm leery of combining two already ill-defined groups of questions into another even less-well-defined group.</p>
<p>I took a look at the existing tagged questions, there's currently 25 questions tagged <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/signal-processing?sort=votes&pagesize=50">signal-processing</a> and 9 questions tagged <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/text-processing?sort=votes&pageSize=15">text-processing</a>.</p>
<p>I can guess that <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/signal-processing" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'signal-processing'" rel="tag">signal-processing</a> would include digital signal processing techniques (within the Arduino's capability), as well as analog filtering.</p>
<p>Browsing the 9 questions tagged <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/text-processing?sort=votes&pageSize=15">text-processing</a>, it's not clear to me what this tag actually means.</p>
<ul>
<li>how an Arduino program(sketch) deals with strings of text input and output?</li>
<li>how the C pre-processor processes the text of the source code?</li>
<li>how the Arduino-specific language elements work?</li>
</ul>
<p>Is <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/6660/program-got-so-many-errors-about-expected-or-before-either">program-got-so-many-errors-about-expected-or-before-either</a> really about text processing? Seems like this question turned out to be about why <code>#define dw 8;</code> should not have the semicolon. Similarly <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/8470/arduino-program-got-error-expected-primary-expression-before-token-error">arduino-program-got-error-expected-primary-expression-before-token-error</a> doesn't contain anything that looks to me like text processing. </p>
<p>What about this question about <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/17774/any-way-to-use-f-macro-with-a-passed-variable">F() FlashStringHelper</a> -- that's useful and related to how constant string expressions are stored in an arduino program, but probably belongs in <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/string" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'string'" rel="tag">string</a> instead.</p>
<p>And for that matter, why <em>isn't</em> <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/1013/how-do-i-split-an-incoming-string">How do I split an incoming string</a> in text-processing when <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/10557/how-to-get-string-parts-from-string">How to get string parts from string</a> is? I'd edit it myself if I was sure what belonged in that tag.</p>
<p>So since <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/text-processing" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'text-processing'" rel="tag">text-processing</a> has only 9 questions, and 0 followers, and it's unclear how these questions are related, let's instead:</p>
<ol>
<li>rename <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/processing" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'processing'" rel="tag">processing</a> to processing-lang as proposed by @Avamander</li>
<li>shore up <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/signal-processing" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'signal-processing'" rel="tag">signal-processing</a> with a clear tag wiki definition</li>
<li>dispatch the 9 questions in <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/text-processing" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'text-processing'" rel="tag">text-processing</a> to wherever they really belong (maybe <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/string" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'string'" rel="tag">string</a>), then burninate <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/text-processing" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'text-processing'" rel="tag">text-processing</a>.</li>
<li>add [text] as a synonym for <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/string" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'string'" rel="tag">string</a></li>
</ol>
<p>Re-tagging individual questions is a straightforward edit, but without a clear well-defined definition of what the tag is supposed to mean, it's harder to find related stuff. </p>
| 2015-09-04T15:26:07.297 |
|discussion|moderation| | 2292 | User always tries to promote their product | <p>If you see all the post from this user <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/users/4169/visual-micro">Visual Micro</a>. A great deal of his/her answers lead the user to a single product. Is this allowed by SE policy and should be flagged?</p>
| <p>Users are allowed post good, relevant answers that talk about their own product or website as long as they disclose their affiliation with the product or website in the answer. </p>
<p>Overt self-promotion should be down-voted or flagged as spam.</p>
<p>The Help Center has a <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/help/promotion">page</a> that addresses this.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Post good, relevant answers, and if some (<strong>but not all</strong>) happen to be about your product or website, that’s okay. However, you must disclose your affiliation in your answers.</p>
</blockquote>
| 2015-09-14T21:46:10.717 |
|discussion| | 2294 | A questionable rejected edit | <p>Now I'm not one to quibble over minor matters (I'm quite a <em>laissez faire</em> type of chap), but I recently made an edit to a <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/14782/im-looking-for-a-way-to-serially-communicate-with-a-multi-mesh-arduino-slave-net">question</a>, which I was surprised to see rejected, especially when I saw the alternative accepted edit.</p>
<p>The edit that I proposed was the following:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/6ZGu0.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/6ZGu0.png" alt="Proposed edit"></a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>I saw that it was rejected by the community for reasons of a subsequent edit,</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/g7h5e.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/g7h5e.png" alt="Community rejection"></a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>To which I thought "Fair enough, I must have missed something, my edit was not sufficient", and was going to leave it at that. However, curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to have a look at the replacement edit. </p>
<p>Imagine my surprise when the edit was merely to substitute a period for a comma, making it even more grammatically incorrect, whilst ignoring the obvious typos.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/skXuy.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/skXuy.png" alt="Actual edit"></a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>I understand that the OP has the overall <em>say so</em> when it comes to edits, but also there is the point of once you have posted something to SE, it also becomes a bit of a community effort to keep everything "spick and span".</p>
<p>Now I know that I am a bit of a stickler for grammar and capitalisation, and that may put people's backs up a bit, but am I missing something?</p>
<p>Admittedly, I did miss the <code>spiting</code> (in the last paragraph) which should probably be <code>splitting</code> but I don't think that was the real reason for rejection.</p>
<p>Hopefully this doesn't sound like a whinge, I would just like to know what the outcome in such circumstances should be. </p>
<p>Should the post be left as it stands, or should I attempt to retry the edits?</p>
| <p>I made an edit a little while back (quite an extensive one, like yours) but while I was doing it the OP made a minor change. Since the OP can edit immediately, my edit was rejected. I think I tried again (laboriously retyping the corrections) and while I did that, the OP made <em>another</em> change! Pffft!</p>
<p>I left it for a while, I can't remember if I ended up changing it.</p>
<p>I suspect this is not at all an attack on your editing (which is usually very good as I recall) but just an unfortunate time-related thing (like, a race condition).</p>
<p>I would advise you to re-attempt your edit.</p>
| 2015-09-16T23:39:53.513 |
|bug| | 2307 | Are we in our own special time zone? | <p>I thought SE measured time in UTC, but I just got notified that I had earned the "<a href="http://winterbash2015.stackexchange.com/a-new-hope" rel="nofollow">A New Hope</a>" hat whose criteria are described as "ask, answer, or vote on December 18th" – as I write this UTC is 15:48 on Thursday, December 17, 2015.</p>
| <p>In case you haven't seen it yet, balpha addressed this <a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/245122/">on the network meta</a>. From there:</p>
<blockquote>
<h2>Leeway on date-based hats</h2>
<p>Unless the requirement mentions a specific timezone, hats that are date-based are often awarded for 14 hours before and 12 hours after the specified date in UTC, to accomodate people everywhere in the world. This means you can earn such a hat even though for you it's not even that day yet.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Example: The hat Living in a Box is awarded for voting to close a question on December 26th. To earn this hat, you have to cast a close vote between 12/25 at 10:00 UTC and 12/27 at 12:00 UTC.</p>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<p>In other words, you got the hat because you voted or posted when it was December 18th somewhere in the world.</p>
| 2015-12-17T15:49:02.243 |
|feature-request| | 2314 | Lots of abandoned (and/or unanswered) questions | <p>Would it be possible to delete questions that have no reply from the OP at least a few months or user is inactive and there are no good and useful answers.</p>
<p>There are quite a lot of questions that should be deleted because the OP has vanished that just clutter arduino.stackexchange.</p>
<p>For ex: <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/7902/nrf24-module-how-to-program-arduino-so-that-it-is-able-to-listen-to-2-pipes">NRF24 module - how to program arduino so that it is able to listen to 2 pipes</a></p>
| <p>I would say some caution is required. Just because the OP has vanished, it does not mean that the question is redundant/useless. I Just remember what I heard from a lecturer back at college, many moons ago: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>If you have a question, but are too scared to ask it, for fear of looking the fool, then fear not. If you have thought of that question, then it is very likely that someone else has either already thought of it, and wants to ask it, or will do.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So, taking the example that you have just closed. The question may be a little unclear, due to the OP's possible poor command of the English language. It may, also, be unanswered, however, that does not mean that there is <em>no answer</em> in the post. In fact there are two comments, which offer short, and not in-depth, answers.</p>
<p>It is not the fault of the OP that the question does not have an actual answer as a posted answer. Many times one can see questions, with good answers posted as comments, for the shear quickness of getting an answer up there... The answerer may not be able to find the time to craft a perfectly worded answer, so just to get the OP on their way, the solution is posted as a comment. Often the writer of a very good comment is asked to turn that in to a answer, so that it may be accepted.</p>
<p>So, in short, closing a question that has answers in the comment, I feel, is a little short sighted, as someone else is probably thinking the same thing, and those comments could just give them the help that they require. I know that they have helped me in the past. </p>
<p>Obviously, some questions are so awful that they deserve to be scrapped, however, in this cited case, I don't believe that it is. </p>
<p>Also, these awful questions will generally get closed through the use of close votes. If no one has voted to close it, then it is probably not a good idea to take an executive decision to close it. Let the democracy vote the questions. As the docs say, a moderator generally has very little to do, until issues are raised. There is no need to go looking for work ;-) </p>
<p>Instead of closing the question, why not turn the comments into answers?</p>
| 2016-01-20T19:39:45.690 |
|discussion| | 2330 | Could some "Achievements" have negative impact? | <p>I was looking at the achievements and I noticed that some might actually have a negative impact on the value of this SE website.</p>
<ul>
<li>Vox Populi/Civic Duty (Use the maximum 40 votes in a day/ Vote 300 or more times)</li>
</ul>
<p>May cause people to spam votes in order to get the achievement.</p>
<ul>
<li>Cleanup (First rollback)</li>
</ul>
<p>I'm not even sure on how to cause this, but I don't believe it's a good thing. Nor should we make people try to get a rollback (for the achievement) I believe.</p>
<ul>
<li>Disciplined (Delete own post with score 3 or higher)</li>
</ul>
<p>This is never a good thing?</p>
<ul>
<li>Peer pressure (Delete own post with score -3 or lower)</li>
</ul>
<p>This requires you to have a -3 post to begin with, so one could, purely for the achievement, attempt to get a -3 post?</p>
<p>It's all a bit theoretical but, the effect isn't easily spotted, so could be bigger than sensed.</p>
<p>(p.s. I found that all SE sites have these achievements, is this meta still the right spot to post this? Or should this be on general Stack Exchange meta?)</p>
| <p>I was going to make a comment as it was going to be a bit long.</p>
<p>This is more of a general SE meta topic seems all sites have these achievements available. </p>
<p>Also badges don't equate to privileges which are earned by making meaningful contribution to each SE site.</p>
<p>So if there are people who want to go around sites asking stupid questions or spamming unimportant questions or answers just to earn a badge they will probably be the ones who have a low rep keeping them away from established user privileges.</p>
<p>There is also a good side to the achievements as it gives the incentive to other users to participate in the site and feel like they have been commended for that involvement. For example</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Vox Populi/Civic Duty (Use the maximum 40 votes in a day/ Vote 300 or more times)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This <em>to me</em> would make people want to show others that there are useful questions or answers on the site and cause that user to participate in site activities.</p>
<p>The one for giving someone a badge for a question with <code>-3</code> votes I would think would be aimed at new users and others here and there so as to keep the site uncluttered from nonsense questions, thus another incentive to users or newbies to help keep the sites running smoothly.</p>
| 2016-02-18T09:18:03.273 |
|discussion|editing| | 2332 | A rash of minor edits | <p>This is not a question (really), but recently I have seen a rash of 10-20 suggested edits, more or less each day, over the past few weeks or so, where the only change was to remove the "Thanks". Now, don't get me wrong, the "Thanks" shouldn't be there, there is a post on SE Meta about it, and I'll add the link if I have time to find it later. I, myself, have also just made edits where the removal of the "Thanks" was the only edit, but that is because the rest of the post was impeccable.</p>
<p>However, the "Thanks" was not, in 90% of these recent cases, the only thing wrong, and the images without description, spelling mistakes, bad grammar, poorly formatted lists and code formatting had been left as they were and <em>were not</em> corrected.</p>
<p>Initially I had clicked upon "Improve Edit", thus giving the previous editor the +2 rep. However, today I have been rejecting all of them, apart from one, as it just seems that lazy editing should not be rewarded.</p>
<p>I have some screen shots as example, but I do not wish to publicly name and shame, and so I will also not name the editor in question - it was the same person in each and every case.</p>
<p>So, I guess that there is a question after all... am I right, or just being a grumpy s*d?</p>
<hr />
<p>I had paused the review of these edits for a moment or two, and by the time that I came back, I noticed that the remaining 4 or 5 had been approved anyway, again with just the "Thanks" having been removed, leaving behind glaring spelling, grammar and capitalisation mistakes, as well as one of the images not even displaying correctly (the markup was missing the preceeding "!" - note the text "TFT Front Image"). Here is a screenshot of the top of the post:</p>
<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/lLML1.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/lLML1.png" alt="Sloppy edit" /></a></p>
<p>I do not want to sound like a nitpicker, but could we all try to be a bit more diligent in both edits and approvals, as awarding +2 points for lazy edits will only encourage more sloppy editing.</p>
<h3>Addendum</h3>
<p>I may be kidding myself here, but I like to think that if people see that their post has been fully edited, that they understand why, take those edits onboard and, hopefully, in their future posts, they then can craft a better, more stylistic (and hopefully easier to read) question or answer (without the "Thanks", typos, spelling mistakes, lack of capitalisation, omission of image descriptions, poor list formatting, question titles written in title case, lack of of code formatting (including the use of the <code><--language: C --></code> tag), bad grammar and what have you), or maybe, I have just been working in the field of documentation for too long...</p>
| <p>There's a rejection reason called "no improvement whatsoever" that applies here. That edit didn't do <em>anything</em> to make the question easier to read or understand, and goodness knows it could've used some of that.</p>
<p>Some folks get all bent out of shape about "thanks" at the end of questions, but I've yet to hear an argument for a simple "thanks" making a question objectively worse; it's at the bottom of the post, it's one word, it doesn't really chew up space and may even make the post seem a bit less demanding. It's not like you're posting a full-on signature that pushes the answers down the page and requires time for readers to parse; it's one word in closing, one superfluous word among many. </p>
<p>And yes... "Thanks" <em>is</em> mostly superfluous and if you're in there editing for other reasons it's probably worth getting rid of... But removing "thanks" while leaving a dozen embarrassing language and formatting errors is kinda just insulting to everyone else who has to read the post, not to mention the author whose post is modified without any appreciable improvement. </p>
<p>These are nuisance edits; please do reject them.</p>
| 2016-02-21T08:37:11.420 |
|discussion| | 2340 | Why does the migrate dialog only list Arduino Meta? | <blockquote>
<p>This question is probably due to my lack of understanding of the inner workings of the review queue code, and the procedures associated with it. This question also <em>may</em> not be SE Arduino specific, in which case I would be happy for it to be migrated to SE Meta. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>If you are reviewing <em>Close Votes</em>, and think that a question is off-topic and should be migrated, you click on <strong>Close</strong>, and are presented with:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/81LOO.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/81LOO.png" alt="Why should this question be closed dialog"></a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Then click on "off-topic because...", and you are presented with:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/V4sZU.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/V4sZU.png" alt="Off topic dialog"></a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Then clicking on "...belongs to another site...", gives you:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/Rxq3q.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/Rxq3q.png" alt="Migration dialog"></a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Why is only Meta listed? Should there not be either a list of other sites (i.e. SO, Programming, EE, ...) or a picker or a text box?</p>
<p>There can't be many cases where questions need to be migrated to Meta. I have seen one or two, but there are more off-topics that could be moved to regular SE sites.</p>
<p>In such a case, is the only recourse, for suggesting a migration, to click the flag link (which is not available in the review stage, but only in the regular view)?</p>
<hr>
<p>My question arose, when reviewing a <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/21747/understanding-the-contents-of-a-library-in-c">question</a> with seemed to have very little, if anything to do with Arduino, and it was in the Close Votes review queue. After having thoroughly read the answers to <a href="https://arduino.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/29/when-should-an-arduino-programming-question-be-moved-to-stack-overflow">When should an Arduino programming question be moved to Stack Overflow?</a> I now see, especially as Nick's answer has given the question more of an Arduino context, that it should actually remain on SE Arduino, as it will, indeed be helpful for others.</p>
| <p>I think it is because we are "only" a Beta site. Once we graduate, I think more migrating options become available.</p>
<p>As a moderator, I can migrate to other sites, and have done in some cases. I usually ask their moderators first, and quite often they decline to accept them. However migration <strong>does</strong> happen.</p>
<p>I think there is some rule that Beta sites don't get to migrate to other sites. I'm not quite sure why such a rule exists (it would seem more logical for it to be the other way).</p>
| 2016-03-15T05:06:20.373 |
|bug|status-bydesign|tags| | 2346 | Unable to see all the tags in the next tag badge | <p>Maybe this is not the right place to ask this kind of question (sorry i this is the case).</p>
<p>I'd like to know why in my <code>Activity User Page</code>, under the section <code>Reputation, Next tag badge</code>, if I click on Choose which bag to tack I can not see all my top tag. In other words, as you can see the three screens look different. I don't know if this is a bug anyway, why this is happening? What I'm missing?</p>
<hr>
<p>Screen 1:
<a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/pgf6m.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/pgf6m.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>
<p>Screen 2:
<a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/tuHxt.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/tuHxt.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>
<p>Screen 3:
<a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/wskuT.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/wskuT.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>
| <p>A bunch of those tags are not eligible for becoming tag badges yet - a tag must appear on a minimum of 100 questions to be considered for tag badges.</p>
<p>The tag badges you cannot track are those that are not eligible to tag badges.</p>
| 2016-04-04T15:31:16.760 |
|feature-request|tags| | 2349 | Extra tag that would be great if were included | <p>I have recently posted about using a 2-Wire speaker with Arduino Esplora, however I couldn't tag it correctly because there was no <code>arduino-esplora</code> tag. The Esplora tag would be very useful in case anyone posts about an Arduino Esplora, and anyone looking to answer questions about the Arduino Esplora. Thank you for taking the time to read this.</p>
| <p>A tag should be created (from scratch) if you use it. It doesn't have to exist in advance.</p>
| 2016-04-10T17:24:46.870 |
|bug|support| | 2354 | How to earn the Vox Populi badge, | <p>The Vox Populi badge is described as :"Use the maximum 40 votes in a day".<br>
However I tried to get this one a couple of times now and I never got to more than 31 votes. Then I get the message "You have used all your votes for today".<br>
It looks like a bug to me or there should be a requirement to have "XX question votes up/down votes" or a rep of ZZ to get to 40 votes? </p>
<p>As to the "usefulness of the badge"<br>
Well ... how useful are the badges anyway :-s.<br>
I see a benefit in "appreciating other peoples effort" by upvoting answers and questions (and somehow in downvoting as well). After all this is a questions and answers site and not a discussion forum. </p>
<p>For those willing to give it a try. It is quite some work to find 40 questions/answers worthy to upvote in a day. </p>
| <p>You have 30 votes per day. This is the limit.</p>
<p>And in addition to that, you get an <strong>extra 10 votes</strong> on questions. <a href="http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/05/vote-for-this-question-or-the-kitten-gets-it/">Read this blog post to find out why</a>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You can vote <strong>30</strong> times per UTC day. You get an additional <strong>10</strong> votes on questions only.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I stumbled accross this little detail at the <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/vote-down">down votes privilege</a> help page. So if you can only vote 31 times, try if you still can vote on questions.</p>
| 2016-04-21T11:08:46.797 |
|discussion| | 2356 | Ok guys, I'm new to this level of review, how does re-open work? | <p><a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/15243">This question</a> is very vague, and they've provided a <em>little</em> more info, but really not enough. I'd like to encourage the user to get in and provide more info.</p>
<p>But if I click re-open, is my ONE re-open vote enough to re-open it? If i'm part of a concensus, then I'd gladly give it a go and if others thought so too then maybe he get's another shot. But on the face of it, it's not really there yet, and would only offer to re-open if others felt that "you know what, let's give the guy an extra chance."</p>
<p>I am new to this level and will "go with the flow". I DO WISH SE sites were more forgiving on vague questions as I know I've had my fare share over the years, but...</p>
<h2>tldr;</h2>
<p>What is the best course of action in this?</p>
| <p>I'm not surprised the question was closed:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>hi guys How can I serial monitor repport send the atmega328 and save in chip? thanks. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>That's incredibly vague. In fact, it doesn't make sense.</p>
<p>OK, he edited it, but the damage was done. A lot of people didn't understand it, and voted to close it. Not one of them was a moderator, even. So it took 5 close votes to close it. Now he need to improve it enough to get 5 reopen votes.</p>
<p>You are, of course, welcome to cast one of those 5 votes.</p>
| 2016-05-15T11:40:14.457 |
|discussion| | 2367 | Dealing with Answers that should be comments | <p>I realise it's a deficiency in the SE system, but a new user (from memory) can't post comments to questions or answers, unless it's their own.</p>
<p>A lot of users throughout SE as a whole do this, post an answer that really should be a comment on a question or the answer in question because they can't offer said comment because their rep os too low. </p>
<p>How should this be handled?</p>
<p>For example, in this question:</p>
<p><a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/3331/error-redefinition-of/26833#26833">error: redefinition of ' '</a></p>
<p>There is a down-voted answer which someone else has come out in support of (rightly or wrongly) but can't add a comment because their rep is 1. But in the scheme of things, if this is in fact valid, then it could serve as a valuable comment and aid to future searchers. </p>
<p>For the interim I am going to manually create the comment for him and recommend his answer for deletion, but I'm open to suggestion on what the "norm" is</p>
| <p><strong>Flag it and let a moderator take a peek.</strong> We have the tools to directly convert an answer to a comment (so that it looks like it was posted by the user who posted the answer) or delete the post altogether. We also have the know-how to properly respond to the user to educate them about Stack Exchange and its practices.</p>
| 2016-07-30T00:06:55.413 |
|discussion| | 2369 | Old questions, marked as recently modified, but no new content | <p>This one, for instance: <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/18667/esp8266-returns-invalid-cause-4">ESP8266 Returns 'invalid' - Cause 4</a></p>
<p>Right now, Aug 7, 2016, 8:31am EST, the Top Questions page says this question was modified 7 hours ago. But the newest time stamp on the question's own page is 8 months old.</p>
<p>I often read old, bumped questions with "modified x hours ago" stamps in the Top Questions list, only to find nothing new.</p>
<p>I'm aware that an unanswered-question bot occasionally feeds the current-question queue, but it doesn't add anything to the question or its answers. Does up/down-voting bump the question? Voting doesn't add any to the content, either, or at least what it adds is minimal and qualitatively different from an edit, comment, or answer.</p>
<p>Or is it something recent that has been deleted? If there is no new content, listing it as having a recent update just adds noise to the Top Questions list.</p>
<p>Listing an old question isn't unreasonable in and of itself, but perhaps the "modified x hours ago" is being applied too liberally.</p>
<p>Update:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Where do you see this timestamp?
That question seems to have fallen off the bottom of the page now, so let's take a more recent example:</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/qR7vx.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/qR7vx.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>
<p>On the <em>Top Questions</em> page at 160809,1322 UTC, this question's listing says "Modified 1 hour ago, Community". But on reading the question page, the most recent change I see is stamped May 11-th. </p>
| <blockquote>
<p>Does up/down-voting bump the question? </p>
</blockquote>
<p>No, voting does not bump questions. <a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/48578/226837">Only answers and edits</a> do.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Or is it something recent that has been deleted? If there is no new content, listing it as having a recent update just adds noise to the Top Questions list.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>No, it is a tool to move question with too few visits and answers randomly to the top of the queue. A small detail: You are not ordering questions by newest or hottest, but by 'activity' (in your screenshot). Here is an excerpt from the FAQ:</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>The Community user will bump non-negatively scored questions that <a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/48578/226837">have at least one answer scoring 0 and none scoring more than that</a>.
<ul>
<li>Questions are <a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/99690">picked randomly from the top-viewed inactive questions</a>.</li>
<li>The number of unanswered questions bumped per hour depends on the site: 4 per hour on Stack Overflow, 1 per hour on Meta, and 2 per hour on Super User and Server Fault. The default for a new site is <a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/184511">1 per hour</a>.</li>
</ul></li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p>That should answer your question, as far as I understand it.</p>
| 2016-08-07T12:46:54.980 |
|discussion| | 2370 | Is an ESP8266 running Arduino code question allowed? | <p>More and more questions seem to be asking about ESP8266 programed via the Arduino IDE and running "Arduino" code, and quite a few about ESP8266 and NodeMCU.<br>
1. Is it OK to ask about ESP8266 programed as an Arduino?<br>
2. Should questions asking about ESP8266 programmed using LUA, etc. be closed as off topic?<br>
3. What about questions about ESP8266 hardware are they off topic too?</p>
| <p>As Arduino-branded boards now include Intel- and ARM family-based boards, the lines can get kind of blurred. If an Arduino-branded, ESP8266-powered MCU board were to appear, should we include it as on-topic but exclude AI-Thinker ESP-01 or other ESP-xx boards?</p>
<p>An alternative to including ESP questions is to Beta an ESP site. But that path leads to fragmenting the {electronics, programming, applications, etc.} questions into too many sites. EE/SE's often unwelcoming stance on Arduino questions began the process. (Or was it already prevalent w/in SE? My experience here doesn't go back that far). </p>
<p>I'd propose we don't feed the process, but adjust Arduino SE's boundaries, and even its name if necessary, to fit the community, not the other way around. Embedded Systems Engineering - what we really do here, despite that most of us are hobbyists - is multi-disciplinary activity that 1) includes electronics, programming, board layout and building, and software tools (IDEs, libraries); and 2) touches hydraulics, robotics, optics, sonar, data communication, networks, chemistry & biology (brewing, f/ex). I've seen us field questions in all of these topics in my time here.</p>
<p>This cross-disciplinary hobby (or career! ) makes a hugely rich learning environment for all of us and we'd give up a lot of that by splitting off some processor or another discipline. Our contributors collectively know a heck of a lot about a lot of things and share it generously. We should encourage that. </p>
<p>We've mostly managed to avoid having hard boundaries and getting unpleasant with new folks that wander close to one, as a few SE sites do. I'd like to encourage that and keep us more <em>in</em>clusive.</p>
| 2016-08-10T12:20:45.937 |
|discussion|site-scope| | 2381 | Are online Arduino simulators on topic? | <p>For example, could I ask a question here about how to use Arduino features in <a href="http://circuits.io" rel="nofollow">http://circuits.io</a>?</p>
| <p>I don't see why not. As long as the question isn't about how to use the <em>simulator</em> itself (they should support their own product in that respect). Bear in mind that simulators don't always mimic real life hardware. Exact timing constraints, and marginal voltage levels might not be reproduced in the same way that real electronics would.</p>
| 2016-10-10T00:55:53.577 |
|discussion|tags|tag-synonyms|retagging| | 2383 | What is the process for deleting/merging duplicate tags? | <p>What is the general procedure for deleting or merging tags that are duplicates/synonyms of other tags?</p>
<p>As I understand, unused tags will get deleted automatically after a period of time.</p>
<p>Where tags should be merged, is there a process where the less established tags get migrated over to the more established tag?</p>
| <p><em>Although this question is answered I found <a href="https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/250930/6075112">this</a> post on meta.stackoverflow that is also useful. (Credit to Kedarnath)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>One way to remove tag is just remove the duplicate tag from all the tagged question (and even replace it with the appropriate tag). After 24 hours all non-used zombie tags get deleted by system.</p>
<p><a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19753/how-can-we-get-rid-of-misspelled-and-unused-or-zombie-tags">How can we get rid of misspelled and unused (or “zombie”) tags?</a></p>
<p>Another way is to post the question on meta and request for the particular tag to be merged or deleted. Moderator/developer will merge/remove it.</p>
| 2016-10-10T15:56:08.120 |
|discussion| | 2389 | What is the standard practice for when the OP edits the question to include the solution? | <p>What is the standard practice for when the OP edits the question to include the solution?</p>
<p>For example:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/21309/error-while-loading-libtinfo-so-5-solved">error while loading libtinfo.so.5 - SOLVED</a></li>
<li><a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/22633/solved-dbno-resp-using-inet-httppost-on-loop">DB:NO RESP Using inet.httpPOST on loop()</a></li>
<li><a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/28548/solved-different-behaviour-during-bootloader-burning">SOLVED - Different behaviour during bootloader burning</a></li>
<li><a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/25395/arduino-uno-stops-working-after-a-while-solved">Arduino UNO stops working after a while - SOLVED</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Ideally, the OP should have posted the solution as an answer and then marked it as the solution.</p>
<p>In some cases, I would like to edit the question by deleting the solution and then post the solution as an answer. The down side to this is that this answer would have no upvotes and may appear insignificant compared to other posts with upvotes. Also, the OP may no longer be active and/or doesn't mark the answer as the solution.</p>
<p>For some posts (especially those without an answer) the correct course of action would be to close/delete the question.</p>
| <p>A good method is to leave a comment to educate the OP that what he/she has done is not in-step with the Stack Exchange system. After all, the aim of this site is that the community builds up and educate other users, in order to improve the overall quality of the site. </p>
<p>We then leave it up to the OP to do the right thing; revert the question back to the original and post the solution as an answer and accept it.</p>
<p>As an example, @Chris Stratton posted this eloquent <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/21309/error-while-loading-libtinfo-so-5-solved">comment</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>@OP in the stack exchange system, questions are marked resolved not by editing the title[/question], but by accepting an answer. If none of the provided answers matches your solution, provide your own and accept that.</p>
</blockquote>
| 2016-10-15T15:44:28.820 |
|discussion| | 2395 | How should I respond to questions that only provide code snippets? | <p>I've been seeing this trend where people, who post questions that are related to problems with their code, just post the part of their code that they think is "pertinent" for the public. How should I respond to that? It's getting quite annoying and I don't know if any of you are seeing this too. </p>
| <p>It's a well-known problem. I set up a web site a while ago: <a href="http://snippets-r-us.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Snippets R Us!</a> to address this issue.</p>
<p>I've seen plenty of times a post that "this must be the problem" (posting a couple of lines of code) and "this can't possibly be the problem" (omitting a whole lot of code).</p>
<p>A useful comment you can make is:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Please post a <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve">Minimal, Complete, and Verifiable example</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The <em>Snippets R Us</em> site tries to explain why this is a good idea. Often narrowing down the problem to a small example clarifies in the poster's mind what the issue is, and isn't.</p>
| 2016-11-04T02:41:39.800 |
|discussion| | 2400 | What if a comment solve the question? | <p>Good days all! </p>
<p>I am new to this forum, and I am trying lo learn how the "rules" here.
After reading several post, such as <a href="https://arduino.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2367/dealing-with-answers-that-should-be-comments">this</a>, <a href="https://arduino.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2397/what-do-you-do-with-ignoramuses">this</a>, and <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment">this</a>, I can assume (<em>correct me if I'm wrong</em>) that you can use comment to ask for clarification without intention (<strong>yet</strong>) to answer the question.</p>
<p>What if instead of asking for clarrification, the comment is solved the problem? like <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/31312/arduino-not-running-the-sketch-with-external-power-supply-of-9v-but-runs-the-pr/31313#31313">this question</a>, it turns out the "error" was the method OP used to observe wether his Arduino works or not, and the OP himself confirm that the problem is solved on comment section. My first thought is "Oh great, it solved. Nothing to do here.", but the question still comes up in the "unanswered" section. Well, nothing is wrong with it but it's make me itch. The accepted answers <a href="https://arduino.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2314/lots-of-abandoned-and-or-unanswered-questions/2319#2319">here</a>, also does not cover about it.</p>
<p>So, what comes in my mind is turn my comment into an answer. (<em>I've mentioned that I'm trying to learn how the "rules", right?</em>) Is it appropriate to ask for accepting an answer? </p>
| <p>Stack Exchange considers comments to be ephemeral - that is, they may be deleted. Thus an "answer" which is just a comment is ultimately not helpful. However initially you may make a comment to test the waters, and then if the OP acknowledges that this is the correct answer, we now have this problem that you mention. I suggest:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>If you are the one who made the comment which answered the question, <strong>turn it into an answer</strong> (ie. copy/paste, or retype with extra detail). Perhaps underneath the question make a further comment that you have now answered it "officially" and hint that the OP could accept the answer.</p></li>
<li><p>If you are not the "owner" of the answer, <strong>make a comment asking the person who commented</strong> to turn it into an answer. You can use the <code>@name</code> syntax to get them "pinged" to notice the comment.</p></li>
<li><p>If this doesn't achieve anything (after, say, a few days) <strong>turn the comment into an answer yourself</strong>, giving attribution to the person who made the comment. (eg. "As Joe Bloggs said in his comment ..."). I have an example of doing that <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/a/14430/10794">here</a>. In that particular case the OP also answered the question. This behaviour is OK - you are allowed to answer your own questions.</p></li>
</ul>
<hr>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>See:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/54945/297719">How should I handle questions which are answered in the comments?</a></li>
<li><p><a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/117268/297719">What should be done with questions that have been self-resolved as a comment instead of an answer?</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>We discussed this on meta.serverfault a short while ago and decided that you should <a href="https://meta.serverfault.com/questions/1886/how-to-handle-unanswered-questions-that-have-the-answer-in-a-comment-or-edited-i/1931#1931">Steal comments that answer the question and post them as an answer</a>. You can always tick the Community Wiki box if you're not comfortable rep whoring.</p>
</blockquote></li>
<li><p>Also see <a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/252303/297719">this answer</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Answer-comments should be reposted as answers — but this is no excuse for plagiarism</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In other words, don't try to pass the answer off as your own, if you didn't write it. </p></li>
</ul>
| 2016-11-18T03:43:09.823 |
|discussion| | 2403 | Pin 13 - Frozen | <p>Our beloved chatroom: "Pin 13" is frozen (due to inactivity).</p>
<p><strong>Can we re-open the chatroom?</strong></p>
<p>Theoretically, we could start a new chatroom, but that wouldn't be a very neat solution (it can be hard to find anything back, if we keep making new "Pin 13"'s.</p>
<p><strong>Can we avoid getting it frozen?</strong></p>
<p>How to avoid getting the same problem in the future? Can a room be pinned, or made as default general chat of a certain SE? Or do we have to program an Arduino to post random links to it every now and then? ;D</p>
<p><strong>Should we even?</strong></p>
<p>The room is frozen, since it was inactive. Theoretically, this means that the room seems to have little function.</p>
<p>Though I believe that it can be usefull to have a general chat.</p>
| <ul>
<li>75% of users on this site turn up, ask one question, get their answer, and are never seen again.</li>
<li>22% of users on this site turn up, ask one question, don't bother waiting around for an answer, and are never seen again.</li>
<li>2% of users on this site are those that show an interest and either want to help others or have an inquiring mind that wants to learn more.</li>
<li>The remaining 1% are us.</li>
</ul>
<p>(Statistics source: the back of my sofa)</p>
<p>Of all the users on the site maybe 3% would find it useful. 1% of those would use it to whinge about the 97% that never come back, the others wouldn't even know it was there.</p>
<p>So what use is a general chat room? Most chat discussions are related to a specific question/answer and thus are between just a couple of people for a short time, and those chat rooms can be created at will as they are needed.</p>
| 2016-11-26T08:42:59.943 |
|discussion|feature-request| | 2412 | Should Arduino SE get a documentation section? | <p>Arduino, along with a couple of other subjects, are quite precise. I mean, all programming questions mostly consern the Arduino IDE and I find that the Arduino.cc's tutorial section rubish.</p>
<p>After looking at what Stack Overflow has in there documentation section, I would find it very convinient and great if we can import that into this site. It has many GREAT tutorials that could solve around 5% of the questions on this site (just a guess, no actual numbers).</p>
<p>And if we, as the Arduino comunity put a little more effort into it, we can turn it into the (maybe) greatest Arduino tutorial book / site out there. I see a lot of benefits for it. Mostly that We can share a lot of knowlage without having to ask a precise question.</p>
<p>So who's with me?</p>
| <p>I'm not sure documentation per se is going to be useful. As Nick has noted reading documentation is something that many of our incoming users ("Ardueenies") are averse to doing.</p>
<p>Another thing they seem averse to doing is searching. The number of duplicate questions we get seems to be rather high. So instead of spending our time on documentation, it may be better to put our efforts into crafting "FAQ" questions where we cover, in detail, a specific topic. Then when we get a question that asks what that FAQ question covers we just close it as a duplicate pointing to the FAQ question.</p>
<p>This has proved successful on EE, especially for the question "What power supply do I want" or "Will my power supply blow up my project because of too many amps" and similar that seem to get asked about every 15 minutes. They all get almost immediately closed as a duplicate of "<a href="https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/34745/choosing-power-supply-how-to-get-the-voltage-and-current-ratings">Choosing power supply, how to get the voltage and current ratings?</a>"</p>
<p>Questions that people ask all the time that could be covered by this kind of thing (please suggest more):</p>
<ul>
<li>I have added a shield that has pins in all the Arduino's holes. Can I still use some of them?</li>
<li>Can I run my Arduino of XXX power supply?</li>
<li>Can I use an external power supply for my Arduino and still plug it into the USB? Will it blow up?</li>
<li>How do you merge two k0d3z together? Will do you it for me? plz?</li>
<li>How do I communicate between my Arduino and my PC / a Website / Neptune?</li>
<li>What is the extra 6 pin header for on the Uno R3?</li>
</ul>
<p>The list could go on for miles I am sure. Building up a store of these good quality in-depth answers would not only make life easier on us, since we would have to write less answers in the long run, but also would help the people asking the questions as they then get handed a well crafted, well thought out, detailed answer to their question instead of a half-arsed answer that we can't be bothered to flesh out because the same question has been asked time and time again and if only they'd spend the time doing a little searching, reading, and <em>thinking about what they have found</em> they would come up with the answer themselves.</p>
| 2016-12-21T00:55:07.773 |
|discussion| | 2413 | Electorate badge description | <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/CiTIh.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/CiTIh.png" alt="enter image description here" /></a></p>
<p>The Electorate gold badge description says <em>'Vote on 600 questions and 25% or more of total votes are on questions'</em></p>
<p>The word <code>questions</code> is duplicate and it is unclear. Let we change this text!</p>
| <p>You are changing the meaning with your suggestions. The meaning is:</p>
<ul>
<li>Vote on 600 <strong>questions</strong> - first requirement</li>
<li>25% or more <strong>total votes</strong> are on questions - second requirement</li>
</ul>
<p>So for example, you might have made 2400 votes, and of that 2400, 600 are on questions (and therefore 1800 are on answers). This would meet the requirement for the badge.</p>
| 2016-12-21T16:10:36.710 |
|discussion| | 2420 | Be wary of accepting edits that are comments of third parties | <p>There are still the usual new users, who, as they are unable to leave a comment, try to suggest an edit to the OP's question, in order to get their point on to the page...</p>
<p>I recently rejected <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/22212">this edit</a>, which was by a third party, who did not have sufficient reputation to comment. The edit actually stated as much:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>EDIT - Not enough points to comment...</p>
<p>I am programming it in Arduino IDE with C. Also, my hardware works
fine. I've used it to do other things. The code is what I'm not sure
what to do.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If one does not check the identity of the author of the edit carefully - against the identity of the OP - it could be assumed by the reviewer (in <em>some</em> cases) that the comment is from the OP (and hence legitimate) in which case, then the edit might be accepted.</p>
<p>As an aside, I am really not sure why new (and inexperienced) users with low reputation are allowed to edit, but not leave a comment, as a bad edit can do much more damage than a bad comment can... but that is a SE issue, in general, and not one that can be resolved on SE Arduino Meta.</p>
| <p>One argument could be that the OP can make edits without needing permission, so you should look more cautiously at suggested edits. It is effectively a red flag that this was <strong>not</strong> the OP. However I'm inclined to agree that if you can't make comments (yet) then you shouldn't be able to slip "comments" in as an edit.</p>
| 2017-01-19T23:15:32.680 |
|discussion| | 2421 | Rejected edit results in loss of constructive code modification | <p>I rejected this <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/22215">suggested edit</a> from an anonymous user, as it clearly conflicted with the original post. The odd thing was though, the edit actually seemed to be rather constructive, as it modified the code (not in an insignificant way), and I was hoping that the suggested edit might be posted as an answer but after having just taken another look at the question I can see that it has not.</p>
<p>Should I post this code modification as an answer myself? By the time that you get around to reading this question, I may have already done so, as it <em>does</em> seem a shame to lost some constructive effort, that was made by someone.</p>
<p>Also, who are these anonymous users? Doesn't anyone who makes an edit actually have to log on to the site? If not, then that seems rather dangerous and foolhardy.</p>
| <p>You can always post it as a community wiki. That way you are not taking the credit for the work of someone else.</p>
| 2017-01-19T23:25:12.360 |
|discussion| | 2424 | Voting to close new users' questions without comment | <p>This question, <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/34127/how-to-compile-the-bootloader-mega-2560-to-57600-speed">How to compile the bootloader mega 2560 to 57600 speed?</a>, by a new user, has four close votes, but no comments.</p>
<p>Yes, it is a terrible question, <em>as it stands</em>, and yes, if it was from a seasoned user, then it could/should be voted to close without comment, as they should know better.</p>
<p>However, as this is a new user, who probably doesn't understand how SE works, a little prompt in a comment, won't hurt. Yes, they should have read the "tour", but when you are looking for an answer, and you are new to SE, then having to wade through the tour, is the last thing on your mind.</p>
<p>I've left a comment, and if no update appears after a few days then yes, it should be closed, as the user has probably disappeared, found their own solution, or no longer cares.</p>
<p>The point I'm trying to make is that, if you are reviewing, and see a bad question, check to see how long the user has been on the site and bearing in mind that we were all "dumb" new users once, just give them a nod in the right direction... </p>
| <p>[I want to use this post, <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/43104/how-to-merge-2-batteries-socketof-6v-each">How to merge 2 batteries socketof 6v each</a>, as a reference.]</p>
<p>I think guys that doesn't know the Ohm's law and doesn't know how to program are beyond redemption. And they want help building an intergalactic laser shooting robot by 2:00 PM, fast! </p>
<p>No amount of help will do any good for them. They are people that don't make any effort learning; they come here to have someone solve their needs.</p>
<p>This kind of posts degrade this site quality. They are not good for the OP and for the rest, it is just junk, pollution.</p>
<p>I vote for a quicker and stricter repeal of junk posts.</p>
| 2017-02-02T03:42:25.867 |
|support| | 2426 | Does Arduino beta have a community ad? | <p>I realize beta sites don't have ads <em>on</em> the site, but I'd like to put one <em>for</em> the site on rotation at <a href="https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/">https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/</a> (they are being renewed for the year now).</p>
<p>If not and someone wants to whip something up, please do -- leave a comment if you need a bit of time, otherwise tomorrow I will. Technically, the ads can be replaced after posting although that may be limited by when it crosses the upvote threshold.</p>
<p>The meta thread on RPi.SE is here: <a href="https://raspberrypi.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/893/community-promotion-ads-2017">https://raspberrypi.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/893/community-promotion-ads-2017</a> For those that aren't familiar with this, Stack Exchange does it annually for all graduated sites. The ads appear in the side bar and have a target link (which would be Arduino.SE).</p>
| <p>Here, I widened your graphic a bit:</p>
<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/2obGY.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/2obGY.png" alt="Widened graphic"></a></p>
| 2017-02-02T15:40:13.083 |
|discussion| | 2431 | Am I allowed to ask a question about explaining what some lines of a code does? | <p>so I have recently started working with Arduino boards and C++, I was doing this project and with luck (meaning I tried random lines of code) I got what I wanted. </p>
<p>However, I don't want to learn this way so I want to ask the members in this site to explain how each line of code works (not the really basic ones). I don't know if I am allowed to do that or not? so please tell me. </p>
<p>Thanks.</p>
| <p>As long as you are asking about a couple of lines of code. Don't post an entire sketch of hundreds of lines and expect a line-by-line explanation.</p>
| 2017-03-03T09:39:22.390 |
|discussion|content-quality|beta-progress|new-users| | 2433 | Does a (legitimate) desire to graduate from beta lead to be (excessively) tolerant of poor questions and/or answers? | <p>I'm new (approx 2 months) to the SE community and right now I'm active only in two of its sites: Arduino beta and Electrical Engineering (EE). But I'm already amazed by how opposed the cultures of these two sites are.</p>
<p>EE has a somewhat wack-a-noob attitude and is very unforgiving of users that don't show any research effort or previous work before asking their questions. After reading a lot of posts from EE meta, I think the reason for that seems to be a widespread concern that valuable contributors will fly away out of frustration if the quality bar is lowered, thus making the site worse off. That looks like a legitimate concern for an already stablished site to me, although they sometimes push it too hard.</p>
<p>And then there's the Arduino site, where the concerns seem to be very different from those in EE. After reading Arduino meta, my feeling is (correct me if I'm wrong, please) that the two main concerns here are "graduating from beta" and "attract and being friendly to users that might not have any experience in electronics and/or coding, and who get bashed in EE and/or SO". Both concerns seem perfectly legitimate to me, but do they lead to be excessively tolerant of poor questions/answers?</p>
<p>Maybe this is not the right time to be worrying about valuable contributors flying away out of frustration with poor questions/answers by new users that shot their questions, take their answers and run to never come back once they got what they want (often leaving unaccepted answers behind). Or is it? Is the desire to graduate from beta allowing too many poor questions/answers go through, and ultimately hurting the graduation of the site by silently driving away valuable contributors? What do you think?</p>
| <p>As someone who has to respond to flagged questions (for moderation) I can say that I don't personally let a <em>bad</em> question through in the hope that the site comes out of Beta. I don't know exactly what criteria Stack Exchange uses for graduating a site, but I think there is an element of "does the site look viable?".</p>
<p>The thing is, Arduino is a beginners' platform, although some users <a href="http://www.gammon.com.au/forum/?id=12623" rel="nofollow noreferrer">such as Petri Häkkinen</a> are highly sophisticated.</p>
<p>I think that EE.SE can be a bit harsh on beginner questions, but perhaps that is the culture that they want, as you observed.</p>
<p>The overall thrust of Stack Exchange in general is to be a helpful site for many disciplines (eg. cooking, aviation, parenting, English) and there must necessarily be different levels of sophistication of questions and answers.</p>
<p>I've done a few "reference questions" personally in the hope that beginners will read those before posting a question that is readily answered already, but that hope is not always met. Perhaps part of being a newbie is that you are also new to the culture of finding answers for yourself.</p>
<p>Meanwhile Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange might legitimately argue that they expect people to ask "engineering level" questions and not 7th year high-school questions. If that is their attitude then I think they are shutting themselves off from helping people who might be capable of learning and contributing in the future (eg. budding electronics enthusiasts) but that is their call.</p>
<p>I also moderate on <a href="http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?board=4.0" rel="nofollow noreferrer">the Arduino Forum</a> where a lot of the questions are of a similar nature to the ones here, that is, beginner questions. It's the nature of a product that is marketed to schools as an introduction to electronics and microncontrollers.</p>
| 2017-03-29T09:26:53.260 |
|discussion|badges|vote-to-close| | 2443 | Voting to close a question, within a question, does not count towards your review total | <p>Today I realized that if I am in a question and I vote to close it, for whatever reason (and I am not the first person to vote to close the question), it doesn't count towards my review count. That means that those close votes don't go towards your Custodian/Reviewer/Steward badge count.</p>
<p>In order for it to count towards your tally, the vote to close has to be from within the Close Votes within the review dashboard.</p>
<p>Is this correct or should it be changed?</p>
<p>It seems to me that peoples effort, to close bad posts as they see them, goes unrewarded. These peoples effort should not be disregarded.</p>
<p>Note: I am sure this is not isolated to Arduino and happens on all SE sites. I have searched SE meta but to no avail.</p>
| <p>I'm still a little confused by "if I am in a question and I vote to close it" but I take it you mean arriving at the question from outside of a review queue.</p>
<p>If so, then yes, this is correct, and you're right, this is network-wide behavior. The intent of the Custodian, Reviewer and Steward badges is first to increase awareness that the review queues exist, and then encourage people to spend time there/reward those who choose to give back to the community in that particular way. They're not so much about the specific actions one can take from the queues, although there are other badges that cover some of those, like Vox Populi and Copy Editor.</p>
<p>The absence of a badge for closing questions is by design; it would result in many spurious close votes from people just trying to get shiny pieces of virtual metal. Closing questions isn't a primary feature here anyways; it's just something that was invented to assist in keeping things tidy while we work on the real goal: making the Internet a better place through Q&A.</p>
| 2017-05-18T14:43:33.437 |
|discussion| | 2450 | Arduino.SE graduation: will users lose privileges? | <p>Arduino.SE is graduating. Woohoo!</p>
<p>When a site graduates the reputation required to earn certain privileges eventually rises. My question is: will users lose privileges earned under beta rep thresholds, as their rep will be below the new thresholds? Are earned privileges kept after graduation?</p>
| <p>Yes, I believe that the "full site" privileges will apply once we get the site design (which as Alex said could well be months away).</p>
<p>For reference, here is the current <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/help/privileges">privileges list</a>. Compare to the numbers for a full site such as <a href="https://electronics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges">Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange</a>.</p>
<p>There are 29 users today who would have access to "edit questions and answers" (2000 rep).</p>
<p>One of the reasons why we took a while to graduate was that, <a href="https://arduino.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2310/beta-progress-update-january-2016">in January 2016</a>, the Stack Exchange people noticed that we had very few people with enough privileges to do things like editing.</p>
<p>In the meantime, before we get our site design done, we all have time to increase our reputation. I notice that quite a few people have quite healthy rep levels, even though they only joined around 6 months ago. You could probably expect those to double in the next 6 months.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Later, the site will still receive a full custom design ...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The word "later" is pretty open. We may well have a year to bump up privileges before the new levels are activated.</p>
| 2017-07-17T16:57:35.830 |
|support|formatting|markdown| | 2454 | Does Arduino support embedded YouTube videos? | <p><a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/298854/351462">Over on Meta Stack Exchange</a>, I am attempting to compile a complete list of Stack Exchange sites which support YouTube embedding.</p>
<p>Searching on Arduino Meta, I was unable to find any discussion of whether embedded YouTube videos are supported. Because <a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/299082/display-embedded-youtube-videos-in-markdown-preview">YouTube embedding is not shown in the markdown preview window</a>, there's no way to test without posting publically.</p>
<p><strong>Are embedded YouTube videos supported on Arduino?</strong></p>
| <p>There's only one way to find out.</p>
<h1>Testing YouTube URL Embedding</h1>
<p><strong>Regular</strong> <code>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gocwRvLhDf8</code></p>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gocwRvLhDf8" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gocwRvLhDf8</a></p>
<hr>
<p><strong>Timestamped</strong> <code>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gocwRvLhDf8&t=22</code></p>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gocwRvLhDf8&t=22" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gocwRvLhDf8&t=22</a></p>
<hr>
<p><strong>Shortened</strong> <code>https://youtu.be/gocwRvLhDf8</code></p>
<p><a href="https://youtu.be/gocwRvLhDf8" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://youtu.be/gocwRvLhDf8</a></p>
<hr>
<p><strong>/Embed</strong> <code>https://www.youtube.com/embed/gocwRvLhDf8</code></p>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gocwRvLhDf8" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.youtube.com/embed/gocwRvLhDf8</a></p>
<hr>
<p><strong>Embedded HTML</strong> <code><iframe width="854" height="480" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gocwRvLhDf8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></code></p>
<hr>
<p><strong>Mobile</strong> <code>https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gocwRvLhDf8</code></p>
<p><a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gocwRvLhDf8" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gocwRvLhDf8</a></p>
<hr>
<p><strong>Flash Player</strong> <code>https://www.youtube.com/v/gocwRvLhDf8</code></p>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/gocwRvLhDf8" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.youtube.com/v/gocwRvLhDf8</a></p>
<hr>
<p><strong>YouTube TV</strong> <code>https://www.youtube.com/tv#/watch/video/idle?v=gocwRvLhDf8</code></p>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/tv#/watch/video/idle?v=gocwRvLhDf8" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.youtube.com/tv#/watch/video/idle?v=gocwRvLhDf8</a></p>
<hr>
<p><sub>See <a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/298854/351462"><em>Which sites have YouTube embedding on?</em></a></sub></p>
| 2017-08-01T14:09:03.980 |
|discussion| | 2456 | Lots of views in one day | <p>I noticed that this question (<a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/q/43188/13425">Burning Arduinos one after another</a>) got almost 4K views in one day. That seems odd since the average on arduino.se seems to be about 25 (guestimate). Is this view count correct?</p>
| <p>It was probably a HNQ (Hot Network Question) - see the side bar that appears on everyone's page. If the question looks interesting it will draw in a lot of views. I can even imagine that the title "Burning Arduinos one after another" might have got people interested.</p>
| 2017-08-01T18:36:55.387 |
|support| | 2467 | 3 Total posts awaiting review | <p>In my status bar on Arduino stackexchange (not meta) I see in the top bar a square, brown with 3 in it and hovering shows: 3 total posts awaiting review.</p>
<p>However, if I look in the review list, all reviews show 0 items (including from meta data).</p>
<p>Where can I find these 3 posts?</p>
<p>I see this since I just got over 2,000 reputation.</p>
| <p>That used to happen to me too. There is some explanation along the lines that you recently reviewed something so it is dropped from the list, but the count on the top bar is a cached one.</p>
<p>See:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/288767/queue-counts-inconsistent">Queue counts inconsistent?</a></li>
<li><a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/233535/review-counts-in-top-bar-and-review-dont-match">Review counts in top-bar and /review don't match</a></li>
<li><a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/230726/297719">Answer for Notify users of possible reviews on toolbar</a></li>
</ul>
| 2017-08-09T12:47:44.907 |
|discussion| | 2474 | Are we a little stingy about upvoting questions? | <p>I felt like questions with accepted answers were upvoted less often here than on other SE sites, so I decided to have a look at the Data Explorer:</p>
<pre><code>select count(distinct Id) from Posts where Score > 0 and CreationDate > '2017-07-01' and AcceptedAnswerId is not null; --35
select count(distinct Id) from Posts where CreationDate > '2017-07-01' and AcceptedAnswerId is not null; --116
</code></pre>
<p>So, about <strong>30%</strong> of questions with accepted answers were upvoted recently. I compared this with some of my other SE sites. </p>
<p>Here's Electrical Engineering SE:</p>
<pre><code>select count(distinct Id) from Posts where Score > 0 and CreationDate > '2017-07-01' and AcceptedAnswerId is not null; --359
select count(distinct Id) from Posts where CreationDate > '2017-07-01' and AcceptedAnswerId is not null; --748
</code></pre>
<p>which is about <strong>48%</strong>.</p>
<p>Here's Science Fiction and Fantasy SE:</p>
<pre><code>select count(distinct Id) from Posts where Score > 0 and CreationDate > '2017-07-01' and AcceptedAnswerId is not null; --378
select count(distinct Id) from Posts where CreationDate > '2017-07-01' and AcceptedAnswerId is not null; --391
</code></pre>
<p>which is <strong>97%</strong>. </p>
<p>Here's StackOverflow:</p>
<pre><code>select count(distinct Id) from Posts where Score > 0 and CreationDate > '2017-07-01' and AcceptedAnswerId is not null; --31594
select count(distinct Id) from Posts where CreationDate > '2017-07-01' and AcceptedAnswerId is not null; --85569
</code></pre>
<p>which is <strong>37%</strong>.</p>
<p>Here's Data Science SE:</p>
<pre><code>select count(distinct Id) from Posts where Score > 0 and CreationDate > '2017-07-01' and AcceptedAnswerId is not null; --40
select count(distinct Id) from Posts where CreationDate > '2017-07-01' and AcceptedAnswerId is not null; --75
</code></pre>
<p>which is about <strong>53%</strong>.</p>
<p>So, we're a little bit on the low side. I wonder why this is? </p>
<p>I'm a noob here myself, but I'd like to see more activity in the Arduino SE. I just figure that if a question is good enough to be left open and receive an answer, with the OP active and polite enough to accept the answer, then in most cases giving the OP a little encouragement with an upvote on the question would help to encourage more participation. </p>
<p>Also, this was a good excuse to play with the Data Explorer :)</p>
| <p>I have to confess I often upvote the question I answered, even if I don't like it that much. Every upvote helps a question hit the HNQ list, which means every answer to it will earn much more reputation that it would otherwise. I know it's pretty much rep chasing (frankly, I don't like HNQ), but those are the rules which are set, and if someone doesn't use them for their advantage, it's their loss.</p>
| 2017-08-12T14:12:35.530 |
|support| | 2490 | Editor keeps making unwanted modifications to my answer | <p>I'm not really sure where to ask for moderator help. @ChrisStratton is engaging in an edit war on <a href="https://arduino.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2436/31794">my answer</a> to <a href="https://arduino.meta.stackexchange.com/q/15/31794">Are clone-specific questions on topic for this site?</a> because he doesn't like my (and, presumably, the original poster's) use of the terminology "clone." I've asked him not change my answer in this way, undone his changes several times now, added additional explanation to my answer to indicate to all that I'm using the term "clone" in a way different from what he seems to feel is the only approved way of using it, and asked him to add his own answer or comments if he disagrees with my answer. Unfortunately, he persists in reintroducing his change to my answer.</p>
<p>What should one do in this situation?</p>
<p>[Side note: the rollback history may look a little odd; I didn't understand how rollbacks actually work until just now so I both failed to rollback his original unwanted change (instead changing it back by hand) and did some incorrect rollbacks while finding out that the link rolls back not the commit it's on but <em>to</em> the commit its on.]</p>
| <p>The question asks:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>However, there may be cases where a <em><strong>clone's</strong></em> [emphasis mine] features, layout, and/or spec deviate from the norm, whether by mistake or by design.</p>
<p>Should this site include questions which relate to specific clones, or would that be off-topic?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When a board has "different specifications" or "different features," it's clearly not a "clone" in the sense of <a href="https://blog.arduino.cc/2013/07/10/send-in-the-clones/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">the arduino.cc blog definition</a> because it's not in the category of "exact (or almost exact) replicas of Arduino boards with a different branding."</p>
<p>In fact, having different features, they fall exactly into what that blog post calls, "derivatives":</p>
<blockquote>
<p>These are products that are derived from the Arduino hardware design but they innovate either by providing a <em><strong>different layout and features</strong></em> [emphasis mine] often to better serve a specific market.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So my argument is:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>The questioner is clearly talking about what that article calls "derivatives," and not talking about what that article calls "clones."</p>
</li>
<li><p>This is not utterly unreasonable: it's not terrible distortion of the word "clone" to use it in this sense nor is the questioner going far outside the common usage (as far as I know) of this word in the Arduino community.</p>
</li>
<li><p>Thus, it's reasonable to focus on answering his question using the terminology he gives, rather than saying, e.g., a) yes, clones are perfectly fine for discussion here, but b) no, what you call clones are not at all suitable for discussion.</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>Feel free to disagree/clarify/whatever in comments on this answer or, better yet, post an answer on the original question that you feel addresses your issues with the use of the word "clone."</p>
<p>(Side note: I am totally open to arguments that a) I am not using "clone" in the sense of the questioner, or b) I should not use it in the sense of the questioner.)</p>
| 2017-09-25T09:13:41.287 |
|discussion| | 2496 | What to do with "company secrets"? | <p>After answering a <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/45294/esp8266wifi-library-severely-slowed-down-my-embedded-system-project">post</a> today, OP said to me:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Actually, my real code is not as short as it looks in this demo code.
I am not allowed to post the real code for some privacy reasons of the
company I work for.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That's after I taking the trouble of actually testing his sketch and timing his execution. I ended working in a posted problem that it is not the real problem. Total waste of time, IMHO.</p>
<p>What must be this site politics with question that involved secret components?</p>
| <p>You answered the question in good faith, and if you can reproduce a problem in the posted code, and post a solution, then that may help someone some day.</p>
<p>If the OP comes back and says "actually that isn't the real code" then you can request the real code, or say "pffft, in that case I can't help you".</p>
<p>This sort of thing isn't that uncommon. For example, people reduce their sketch size to make it small enough to post, and that frees up enough RAM that the sketch no longer fails due to running out of RAM.</p>
| 2017-10-05T14:13:12.653 |
|discussion| | 2499 | What to do with low quality posts? | <p>Yesterday I review several years old question with zero answers, voting to close them, which started a debate with perl1234 and gre_gor.</p>
<p>I voted with this explanation:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it's a year old
question with no answers.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And perl1234 commented:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>not being answered is not a valid reason to close a question. I've
answered questions that were years old. Just because nobody had an
answer at the time the question was asked doesn't mean it should be
closed. The sad thing is that if you would just make a little effort
to look at these questions you're trying to close you would have found
valid reasons for closing many of them</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Well, I'm really wanting to close them because they are <em>low quality post</em>, but that is subjetive criteria, and I thought better to backup that with a objective parameter. Hence, "one year old, no answer".</p>
<p>Of course, not every year old, no answer question is a low quality post. That's why I read everyone one of them and vote to close the most evident culprits. </p>
<p>I think this a best place to explain what I'm doing and reach a community consensus about how to proceed.</p>
<p><strong>Rationality</strong></p>
<p>The problem with Arduino SE is too many low quality posts, which is evident when you also visit other sites, like Electrical SE or Bicycle SE (long time member there).</p>
<p>There are several markers that identify a low quality post:</p>
<ul>
<li>First post by a newly create user.</li>
<li>From user that never returns to Arduino SE for a year or more.</li>
<li>No answers, no comments.</li>
<li>No sketch, no schematic, no product identification, poorly written question.</li>
<li>No effort in finding a solution (Arduino SE, Google).</li>
<li>Obvious lack of minimal training in electricity and/or programming.</li>
<li>Demands for complete solution (sketch and/or schematic).</li>
</ul>
<p>If a question has had no answer for a year or more, it will never have it. There is no point in keeping that question in the site, because even the OP has no interest in the answer.</p>
<p><strong>How to deal with it</strong></p>
<p>The problem is that <em>low quality post</em> isn't one of the reason for closing post, and the other reasons are not fit for the purpose.</p>
<p>A too broad question can be restricted. An unclear what you are asking can be clarified. An off topic can be migrated, and low quality post generally are not duplicated, nor opinion-based. </p>
<p>A low quality post is beyond redemption. There is noting you can do to improve it. They aren't even wrong.</p>
<p>And the question is: What we do to filter out low quality post?</p>
| <p>You can't close a question because it doesn't have answers, but you can <strong>and should</strong> vote to close a question if it has been long abandoned by the asker in a state which makes it <strong>unanswerable</strong> - and especially if they've failed to respond to comments requesting clarification.</p>
<p>Naturally not having answers (or having only terrible ones) often follows from being unanswerable. But the closing has to follow from the rule violation of posting and then failing to correct an unanswerable question, not from the community's disinterest in answering.</p>
| 2017-10-25T14:35:19.700 |
|discussion| | 2504 | How to deal with dead question? | <p>What we do with <strong>dead</strong> still-open questions?</p>
<p>By <em>dead</em> I mean that the OP had not return to Arduino SE for over a year (and probably will never come back), and therefore the question will be never closed, even if it had acceptable answers posted.</p>
<p>Case: <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/6527/where-do-serialport-names-come-from">Where do serialport names come from?</a>.</p>
| <p>I don't think that you necessarily mean <em>closed</em> but rather <em>has an accepted answer</em>, and as such, is thus removed from the list of unanswered questions. I noticed such a question yesterday: <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/46062/hc-12-with-arduino-mega">HC-12 with Arduino Mega</a>.</p>
<p>It is a reasonably presented question, with code and a schematic, and it seems as if the user had found a solution. However, an answer was never posted, and even though a suitable answer <em>could</em> be extracted from the comments (see <a href="https://arduino.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2400/what-if-a-comment-solve-the-question">What if a comment solve the question?</a>), the OP may never return to mark it as accepted and therefore remove the question from the unanswered list of questions.</p>
<p>Another example, but where there is already an answer, is <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/39705/how-to-get-the-server-response-when-i-post-to-a-web-api">How to get the server response when I post to a web api</a></p>
<p>There was a meta question (to which Nick gave an answer to) about having moderators marking an answer which is an obvious solution to a question, as the accepted answer, see <a href="https://arduino.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2320/questions-with-good-answers-but-none-accepted">Questions with good answers but none accepted</a>.</p>
| 2017-10-31T08:30:26.517 |
|discussion|flagging| | 2519 | Attention: some of your recent flags have been declined - please review them before flagging this post! | <p>Sometimes, when flagging an answer, this message appears:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Attention: some of your recent flags have been declined - please
review them before flagging this post!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What I am supposed to do? I follow the link to the review, but I can't see any action, button, link or nothing.</p>
| <p>You can actually view a list of your flags and how they were handled if you would like to review. If you go to your user profile on the <code>Activity</code> tab, you can click on the <code>XX Helpful Flags</code> and you get a list of all of your flags.</p>
<p>I don't know exactly how the algorithm for warning works, as roughly 90% of your flags were deemed "helpful." If you're worried about it, look at your declined posts to look for a pattern (in your case there does seem to be a specific type of flag).</p>
<p>Also, when looking at your flag history, please note that <code>Disputed</code> is not <code>Declined</code>. Here's what it means: <a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/95277/190823">https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/95277/190823</a></p>
| 2018-02-08T08:55:28.833 |
|discussion|flagging| | 2530 | Declined spam flag | <p>I raised a spam flag <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/a/50385">on an answer</a>, that doesn't answer the question, but it's tying to sell a product.</p>
<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/ELoKU.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/ELoKU.png" alt=""></a></p>
<p>I now realized that the product in question is mentioned in another answer and the author of the flagged answer is the maker if it, trying to reply to OP's comment, inquiring about the product.</p>
<p>The proper flag should probably have been just a NAA, but the mod should have still deleted it as a non-answer.</p>
<p>I assume there was a mistake by a mod, because the message refers to the Gerben's comment linking to the product.</p>
<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/jmU2Y.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/jmU2Y.png" alt=""></a></p>
<p>Should I have just flagged this post as NAA or is this post still considered spam?</p>
| <p>That was my mistake. When I saw the flag I thought it was a flag on the comment, not the answer below. Due to the way the page appeared on my monitor I only saw the comment which mentioned where the product could be bought, and assumed that was what the flag was for.</p>
<p>You are quite right that the answer in question made no attempt to answer the (original) question, so I'll deal with that. :)</p>
<p>(The answer was answering a comment under a question, however I don't think that Crossroads realizes that answers are supposed to answer the main question, not auxilliary questions raised in comments).</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Should I have just flagged this post as NAA or is this post still considered spam?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I don't think the post is spam, since the author of the post was trying to help someone find a board, mentioned in my answer, so this is hardly spam. You are right, though, to flag as not an answer.</p>
| 2018-03-03T02:31:26.723 |
|discussion| | 2543 | Trouble with posting code correctly | <p>Why is it that the code I have posted appears jumbled up but looks normal when inserted between brackets?</p>
| <ul>
<li><p>Format your code in the Arduino IDE (or in whatever code-entry editor you are using). In the Arduino IDE, it's the 'Tools | Autoformat' menu item.</p></li>
<li><p>Copy/paste your code into Arduino Stack Exchange's question or answer text-entry box. (If you're trying to show code in a comment, forget about formatting. Comment boxes strip all the indenting and newlines out of it. The best you can do in a comment is enclose it in back-ticks: `` to give it a gray background).</p></li>
<li><p>Select the entire block of code and click the '{}' symbol in the text-entry box's header. That will indent your code so the site will recognize it as code and keep its formatting.</p></li>
</ul>
| 2018-10-06T00:47:34.600 |
|discussion|specific-question| | 2565 | 6 downvotes in 6 days - what am I doing wrong? | <p>I've recently joined Arduino.SE but am a 7K+ reputation member of both SO and U&L.</p>
<p>Every community has its different mores, and I'm guessing that I've not yet grokked this one's.</p>
<p>My <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/users/53509/tom-hale?tab=reputation">reputation page</a> shows -12 reputation over the last 6 days on both questions and answers.</p>
<p>Can someone explain what I may be missing? Or have I just had a bad run of luck?</p>
| <p>This site doesn't tend to up or down-vote much which therefore skews the votes you do get. As an example, I got 77 votes for <a href="https://cooking.stackexchange.com/a/88504/43247">an answer on Cooking Stack Exchange</a> where I basically posted a photo of a kitchen strainer which took me a couple of minutes to take. On the other hand, I've spent hours on posts which only got a handful of votes. For example <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/a/22237/10794">this one about interrupts</a> which only got 11 upvotes (maybe I didn't spend hours on that particular one, but I still get a very low upvote rate).</p>
<p>I had down-votes when I initially joined this site, and now I am a moderator. I suggest you ignore the implied criticism and just do your best to post interesting questions, and also interesting answers and let your work speak for itself.</p>
<p>To a certain extent people will downvote a question if it looks like you haven't tried all that hard to research before posting, or if there is a similar question already with an answer. I'm not saying this applies in your case, but that tends to be what happens.</p>
| 2019-02-15T06:27:58.593 |
|discussion|meta| | 2571 | Is it allowed to ask a question if you've already have an solution/answer? | <p>Is it allowed to ask a question if you've already have an solution/answer?</p>
<p>This could be done to get alternative options/solutions for algorithms. But on the other hand may distract from people who are actually struggling with a real problem.</p>
<p>Also, for algorithms/improvements, you have programming or programming puzzle stackexchange which may be better suited. And when talking about algorithms/programming it's not really specific to Arduino anymore, as at this point it's usually C/C++.</p>
<hr>
<p>My example:
I have an LED matrix of 12x12, but they are connected in an "S" way.
Like for example:</p>
<pre><code> 1 2 3 4
8 7 6 5
9 10 11 12
16 15 14 13
</code></pre>
<p>Now I would have to map these LED nr's to X-Y coordinates (which is not just x+y*width because it's in an S pattern).</p>
<p>I feel it's not really Arduino specific and I already have (2 actually) answers for it, but I'm really curious to see if there's another simpler solution to it (to the logic to my own solution).</p>
<hr>
<p>Also, I'm curious if as in code-golf you're allowed to state that the answer with least bytes / fastest execution time (or something like that) will 'win'? </p>
| <p>You're kind of in a borderland area there :)</p>
<p>I would say:</p>
<ul>
<li>If you are looking for other ways to implement something, or</li>
<li>Your code uses the Arduino API or Arduino libraries, or</li>
<li>You have something that "works" but you don't know if it's the "right" way of doing it</li>
</ul>
<p>then sure, go for it. While it could apply to other environments, if you're doing on Adruino with Arduino libraries (like the FastLED library for example) then I for one have no problem with it.</p>
<p>I wouldn't go for the "code golf" thing though. What the "best" answer is would be very subjective. Readability could be more beneficial than shaving one clock cycle off the execution - especially when the Arduino API itself is not that efficient in the first place.</p>
<p>As far as your example goes, I would submit an answer. It would contain something like:</p>
<pre><code>int ledNumber = (y * width) + ((y & 1) ? (width - x - 1) : x);
</code></pre>
| 2019-03-17T10:27:11.457 |
|discussion| | 2573 | Flagging: "Not an Answer", "Very Low Quality" or something else? | <p>I've had a couple of flags declined which has made me wonder if I fully understand the use of particular flags on Arduino:SE, so I'm going to post this as a question here in the hope of getting some guidance.</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>Flag: Not An Answer</strong></p>
<p>A little while back, I flagged <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/a/35886/33608">this answer</a> as <strong><em>Not an Answer</em></strong> since it doesn't appear to make any attempt to answer the question that the OP had actually asked. The guidance for the flag states:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This was posted as an answer, but it does not attempt to answer the question. It should possibly be an edit, a comment, another question, or deleted altogether.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In this case - in my opinion - the answer posted makes no attempt to answer the question that was asked. A later (upvoted) comment seems to agree. Yet the flag was declined:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>declined - flags should not be used to indicate technical inaccuracies, or an altogether wrong answer</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Now, the answer in this case doesn't appear to be '<em>technically inaccurate</em>', or '<em>wrong</em>'. It just makes no attempt to answer the question that was asked!</p>
<p>Now, my analogy here would be if I asked how to get from London to Glasgow without using the train, and the reply told me to catch the 12:42 train from Euston. Yes, it's an answer, it may not be '<em>technically inaccurate</em>', or '<em>wrong</em>', but it doesn't make any attempt to answer the question that I actually asked!</p>
<p>So what am I missing?</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>Flag: Very Low Quality</strong></p>
<p>Today, I flagged <a href="https://arduino.stackexchange.com/a/63165/33608">this answer</a> for being <strong><em>Very Low Quality</em></strong> because it doesn't appear to be an answer to the question that was asked, although in this case it does attempt to address an '<em>assumption</em>' mentioned by the OP in that question.</p>
<p>Now, I would say - again in my opinion - that this should have been posted as a comment on the question, rather than as an answer. However the user that posted the answer doesn't have sufficient rep to post comments.</p>
<p>The actual question is clearly stated both in the title, and in the body of the question, and this makes no attempt to answer it. </p>
<p>My first reaction was to flag it as <strong><em>Not an Answer</em></strong> since the fact that it should be a comment is explicitly given as a reason in the guidance for that flag. However, given my previous experience I thought I'd play safe and just flag it as <strong><em>Very Low Quality</em></strong> since - again in my opinion - the <em>content problems</em> mean that it also meets the criteria for that flag:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This question has severe formatting or content problems. This question is unlikely to be salvageable through editing, and might need to be removed.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>(Incidentally, the user that posted the answer has since made it clear in the comments that they were addressing the assumption rather than the question)</p>
<p>Again, the flag was declined:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>declined - flags should not be used to indicate technical inaccuracies, or an altogether wrong answer</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Once again, the answer doesn't appear to be '<em>technically inaccurate</em>', or '<em>wrong</em>'. As before, it just make no attempt to answer the question that was asked!</p>
<p>So, was I wrong to flag this as <strong><em>Very Low Quality</em></strong>? Should it instead have been flagged as <strong><em>Not an Answer</em></strong> (as my first instinct suggested)? Or should we not bother flagging answers like this at all?</p>
<hr>
<p>Clearly I am missing something, and some guidance would be appreciated here.</p>
| <p>Just another perspective to add to the discussion:</p>
<p>I look at the answer with the thought of another person having a similar issue who has found this page through a search.</p>
<p>Sometimes it does not answer the exact question the OP has asked or has strayed out of the OP's bounds, I think to myself, if I came across this with my similar issue would I find it useful?</p>
| 2019-04-04T23:57:47.237 |
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