The Arduino site proposal is moving forward at a good rate. As a part of the scope of the Arduino site will cover questions that currently fall in the scope of EE, what will be the benefits (and problems) in having a separate Arduino site ?
This post discusses this issue in some detail, and I mostly agree with the views given there.
The analogy to Arduino and Electrical Engineering should be clear.
This question asked by an Arduino user got me thinking about a different concern. The OP there is making a very good effort to break out of the Arduino abstractions and move to the right on this chart, to electrical engineering.
The difficulty, it seems, is that there's a clear incremental path to move left on this scale, but to move to the right is more difficult. Sure, there's a huge body of knowledge that a physicist possesses that a mathematician does not, but an experienced mathematician wanting to move to the left will start at basic physics, while a physicist trying to move to the right will start at advanced mathematics.
The analogy breaks down here, because you'd expect every physicist understands that their field is built upon mathematics, and they'd know well enough that they have to jump all the way back to basic mathematics and work to the left to bridge the gap. However, I've had some Arduino users tell me they know some electronics, as if knowing to use an Arduino is like basic electrical engineering. But it's not: knowing the fundamentals of a field is not the same as knowing the applications of a field. Consequently, it seems to take a bit of tough love to get people wanting to move from Arduino to electrical engineering to realize they lack the fundamental understanding necessary to implement a circuit that doesn't come ready-made on a shield, and that they need to back off and focus on the fundamentals.
It would seem to me that having a separate site for Arduino would benefit both communities by making that movement more clear.
I'd be interested to know if this concept of jumping backwards being harder resonates with anyone else. I learned assembly first and Python last, which isn't how most people do it, but I tried going in the other direction of abstraction and found it really hard. Am I just an odd learner?
Well the only thing I can see is that EE.SE is unfriendly to questions that are not well thought out.
Let's face it: Everyone here expects the OP to have read the relevant technical documentation, which in itself is quite complicated and difficult, to be able to provide relevant information and there are numerous questions where users are simply chanting "SCHEMATIC, SCHEMATIC" and OP fails to deliver one. There's also the distributor side: From what I've seen typical distributors of Arduino community are different from typical distributors of EE community and often Arduino community distributors simply don't provide easy access to relevant information about their products. I remember question in which OP asked about using stepper motor with Arduino. He provided link to distributors webpage and it took some effort just to find the pinout of the motor. Some basic information like power ratings or normal coil resistance simply wasn't there.
Another thing that's often assumed is that OP is actually in control of circuits which he uses (and let's face it: Arduino users wouldn't be using all that much Arduino if they could easily make their own PCBs with needed components) as well as software (and from what I've seen, standard Arduino procedure is to use already available libraries even for "simplest" tasks).
There's also the measurement instrument problem which I think many Arduino users face. Here it's more or less assumed that everyone has at least a good multimeter. Oscilloscope is also considered a basic tool of electrical engineering, but that's something that most Arduino users won't have access to.
Another thing would be familiarity to the ecosystem: I've seen many Arduino users expecting us to actually know names of each shield and what components it has and so on. On the other hand, more or less each board a "typical" user here makes would be a custom board. There's the ever-present hatred for Fritzing diagrams here (I understand why they aren't all that useful, but many Arduino users won't), which seem to be the default way of presenting information for the Arduino community. Learning how to use even the simplest EDA tools is quite complicated and probably isn't what an Arduino user would be interested in, at least initially.
Another thing I've noticed in the Arduino community is what I'd call cargocultism. Very large number of tutorials don't actually explain what's happening in any detail. They simply list the spell ingredients and magical words to be written into the IDE. This may seem a bit rude to that community, but I understand that most of its members don't actually want to know details. They just want to get whatever it is they're building to work.
So if there's an Arduino web-site that will cater to users who have the habits I've listed, then I guess such community would be beneficial to them, since they'd have a "friendly" environment in which they could grow. One thing I fear is that most problems I've noticed with Arduino questions here are also typical problems of what we call "bad questions". This is also related with what we expect to be the "due diligence" when posting a question. Something obvious to an EE wouldn't be as obvious to Arduino user.
I know that this wasn't part of the question, but I'd like to write a little bit the other side: What would be the downsides of having an Arduinio site: Well first, we'd be separating communities and doing so a bit artificially. This could might the "grumpy experts" to down and close-vote Arduino questions here. Another side-effect would be the encouraging spread of bad practices that are currently common in Arduino community. For example I've seen many posts that show something as simple as using interrupts instead of busy-waits as a revelation.
There's also the fact that sooner or later Arduino user is going to have to go outside of the Aruduino comfort-zone. Here we'll be able to provide the needed guidance, which may or may not be available on Arduino-specific site.
Finally there's also the fact that we have both Ubuntu and Unix sites. I understand that some people like their GNU/Linux with "training wheels" and I see that similar situation exists with respect to the Arduino and EE.SE.
Another thing that's often assumed is that OP is actually in control of circuits which he uses (and let's face it: Arduino users wouldn't be using all that much Arduino if they could easily make their own PCBs with needed components) - I have a pile of arduinos that I use when I need to throw something that can talk to a piece of custom hardware together in a hurry. If you just need a ATmega and a USB-serial interface in a box, the arduino is a great, low-effort tool.
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Feb 17, 2013 at 6:33
If they want their own site they will start their own site. That's not up to us. All we can decide is what to do with arduino questions.
Arduino questions are acceptable here if they are really about electronics. Even if a specific arduino site existed, I wouldn't want to move such questions if they were posted here. This site is for anyone that wants to understand something about electronics or low level hardware-related programming. Questions that meet these criteria and happen to include a arduino in them should be welcome here, as they are now. If you just want "giv me da codz", then you're not welcome here whether there is a arduino site or not. In other words, we shouldn't do anything different, and everything else isn't up to us.
I also want to respond to accusation that we are not welcoming to arduino users. This is false. What we are not welcoming to, and must never be welcoming to, is sloppily thought out and asked questions that lack obvious information, use baby talk instead of real English, and that can't be bothered to follow the few basic rules of the language that even non-native English speakers have no excuse for not following. For example, we see far too many posts here where the first word of each sentence isn't even capitalized. That's not unfamiliarity with English, just laziness.
I think the reason the arduino community feels they are not welcome here is because arduino users ask a disproportionately large share of the bad questions. When they rightfully get sent home without a cookie, they of course blame us instead of their laziness since we aren't there to defend ourselves. These bad apples are in fact not welcome here, as is anyone else that can't be bothered to read the FAQ and put a little thought into what they are asking and how to present the question. It only takes a few to make a lot of noise and give us a bad rep as a result. That's unfortunate, but that's how the world works. The same mentality that allows one to ask a poor question will also prevent one from accepting responsibility for the result.
One thing we must never do is lower our standards. We do get a lot of good questions too, and people that are willing to work with us to fix a question in response to comments. That is what this site is really about. Once we start down the slippery slope of allowing bad units, unlabled quantities, difficult to read schematics, and annoying to parse English, the site will only attract more of the same. Then all that will be left is the clueless text-speaking to the clueless, and anyone that knows what they are doing and has some standards will be long gone.
I have heard the accusation that this is not newbie-friendly, but that is again false. None of what makes a question bad (or good, for that matter) has anything to do with electronics knowledge. It's OK to be ignorant, but never OK to be stupid and lazy. Newbies and experienced people are both equally capable of reading the FAQ, looking at other questions to see what is acceptable and not here, writing in proper English, and keeping the context of the audience in mind. These are all obvious things to do when you enter a community, and are not hard.
The idea of StackExchange having multiple sites for multiple subjects is a very good one. It keeps the sites clean since there is a strict policy on on- and off-topic questions. I consider it to be a very good thing that SuperUser and Electrical Engineering are separated, since it is definitely a different users group.
However, we shouldn't have too much sites. There are questions about arduino that would be a better fit for EE, for example: What kind of power supply can power this stepper motor connected to an Arduino? This question has actually nothing to do with arduino, but simply because an arduino is used in the project, it would go to the arduino site. You will say: we can handle that with making it clear in the FAQ and do migrations. Yes, it is possible, and it would cost you some time and energy.
Many arduino questions are either coding problems, "I haven't read the datasheet now what should I do"-problems, or "what part should I use"-questions. These problems aren't specific to arduino and are useful to anyone using a microcontroller. By migrating all these questions to a new arduino site, people will see the title of the site: "Arduino" and think: "Meh, arduino, I don't like arduino, it won't be useful" while the post actually is useful as the question isn't specific to arduino.
We have a living arduino society here on EE, what will be the benefits of having to look at two sites instead of one? I can't imagine anyone who would go to an Arduino site but won't go to EE. With favorited and ignored tags you can do a lot to make the site as you like. For example, I've never used with ARM, so I ignored the relevant tags and don't see those questions anymore. I do like PICs, so I favorited the relevant tags and get those questions highlighted. Arduino users can do the same to make the site as they wish.
Making a new site will just be unuseful for anyone working with arduino since they will be interested in EE as well. Also, questions on the arduino website (like coding problems, part recommendations) will pop up on EE as well. There would be an enormous overlap between EE and Arduino, which makes it not useful.
I don't want to have to search another site for Arduino-specific things. What's next, PIC and AVR will have their own sites?
It's not hard for people to ignore questions tagged Arduino, and similarly, for people interested in it to favorite the tag.
For example, I know nothing about Apple programming (Carbon, iOS, etc.) and have hidden those tags on StackOverflow so I see and can focus more on the things I do know.
Imagine if someone asks (on an Arduino site) about what value of capacitor to use for such-and-such. Is it going to get migrated back here?
There's a very wide gray area, in my opinion. It's somewhat difficult deciding whether to ask AVR programming questions here or on StackOverflow. I typically get better responses here, because people are familiar with the electronics and the programming; I just try to ensure that my question is appropriate to electronics engineering, rather than programming fundamentals.
I think there are very few, if any, benefits to having a separate Arduino site.
