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Original question: Review request: DIY DC to 50MHz differential oscilloscope probe

It is getting completely ignored (save for two comments), despite an outstanding bounty and several edits no narrow down the scope. I don't think that my question is too broad, too low effort or too niche for the knowledge of other users. At the time I'm writing this, it has four upvotes, one downvote and no close votes that I am aware of. What is wrong with my question, and how could I improve it? Is it just too boring to answer? Is this kind of question acceptance on this site? This led me to believe that it is: Circuit review acceptable?

edit:

In addition to downvoting, please tell me what I'm doing wrong. Downvoting alone is completely useless and only serves to annoy people.

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    \$\begingroup\$ I didn't downvote, in fact I upvoted (see my answer), but I object to downvoting " only serves to annoy people". There are a number of other purposes even for anonymous downvoting, like sorting content by good/bad, punishing someone for dumping crap on us, and contributing to locking them out of the system. \$\endgroup\$
    – Olin Lathrop
    Jan 31, 2018 at 14:37
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Olin I partially agree about the anonymity of downvote, but the unexplained downvote is which is most anoying. I had only a downvote in a unpretentious answer, I don't know who did it, and don't know why someone downvoted it. \$\endgroup\$
    – mguima
    Feb 21, 2018 at 23:50

4 Answers 4

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Thank you for posting your design for review (+1 over there). You've done a thorough job. Not a lot of people are in the position to review that and do it justice, I suspect.

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You seem to have done a decent job writing the question, so I just went and upvoted it. However, I'm not going to answer it because, basically, it would be too much work.

After a quick glance, this isn't the kind of question where I can get away with reading a headline, scanning for a obvious stupidity, then writing a simple answer. It looks like I'd have to read every word, and probably refer back and forth a few times. I notice there are 4 separate questions in there.

The schematics are well presented, but would require a few minutes to really understand what you are trying to do, how you went about it, and what problems there might be with that approach. That by itself might be OK, but not with all the other stuff around it. Then you're showing a layout, so at least part of this question is about layout too.

It's just too overwhelming to dig into. It crosses the line from casual free help to essentially a design review that would take some time. I charge for those.

This question should be broken into multiple individual questions. I just tried to close the whole thing as too broad, but the system didn't let me due to the open bounty.

Remember that people here are volunteers you are asking for a favor. Keep it simple. Make people feel they can accomplish something with the limited free time they have to spend here.

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As others have stated, your question is simply too complex.

As a volunteer, seeing something as complete as that it tends to put me off. I could spend all day analysing and simulating parts of it but that really is way too much time for this hobby pastime. Moreover, without being able to sit down with it hooked up to a scope on the bench, a lot of anything I could say would be just hand-wavy generalizations.

In truth, if you need a proper review, you need someone local to help with hands on experience to really do it justice.

Further, that is also a pretty niche development area that many folks really do not have much experience with.

Me, and I am sure many others, just move on to the next question without giving it an up or down vote.

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I'm far from an expert in this specific field of electronics, but I may have a few clues on why it hasn't been answered:

  • This isn't straightforward electronics. So it excludes a lot of people (like me) who aren't comfortable with relatively high-frequency black magic analog electronics.
  • Answering your question requires to 100% understand your design, your constraints, and the choices you made, which likely implies spending a significant proportion of the time you spent on it yourself (and it probably took much more time than the 15 minutes people generally take to answer a question). This is also probably the reason of the downvote.
  • You seem to have made a good job already so maybe there isn't much to add, even for an expert. I would be tempted to think the realtively high number of upvotes confirms this. People usually don't upvote things they don't understand (and I didn't upvote your post - sorry - for this very reason: I'm actually unable to tell if it makes sense). So, to some extent, this is a hint that some people may have understood your design, but couldn't think of anything more to improve it.
  • At some point, the only thing that will tell if the design works is to test it. Maybe you've reached that point.
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    \$\begingroup\$ I didn't take the time to understand the question either. I upvoted it because it seems to be well written, well presented, and a honest problem. I considered it the opposite of downvoting due to bad formatting, scribbled schematic, not capitalizing the word "I", etc. \$\endgroup\$
    – Olin Lathrop
    Feb 1, 2018 at 12:25

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