13 replies to this topic

[Quiche31]

Greetings, Netduino community!

The new developments in the NETMF world and of the supporting platforms, such as Netduino or FEZ, is quite amazing and interesting, in particular in view with the open-source spirit that comes with. Forums such as this one are very helpful, but not necessarily optimum, for our hobbyists community, as code-sharing is not too well supported by the forum model.
Owning (and playing with) several Netduino, FEZ, and mbed modules, I spend considerable amount of my spare time on the various supporting sites. It is my personal view that the Wiki model is best for supporting our hobbysts community, and mped has the Gold medal on this respect. Just check out their "handbook" and "cookbook" wikis and you'll have an idea of what I mean, let alone their code import/export capability, that is only applicable to IDE "in the cloud" like theirs. In the NETMF world, I grant an honorable mention to GHI/FEZ wiki, but they still have a long way to go to match mbed.

There is so much to learn and be inspired from eachother's mini-projects and code-drops. My simple question is: would the members of this community like to see a wiki on Netduino, and would Netduino support it?

JP

[Omar (OZ)]

Greetings, Netduino community!

...

My simple question is: would the members of this community like to see a wiki on Netduino, and would Netduino support it?

JP

I think that is a really good idea! wikis are awesome and a Netduino wiki would be pretty cool and easier to use.

[CW2]

There is so much to learn and be inspired from eachother's mini-projects and code-drops. My simple question is: would the members of this community like to see a wiki on Netduino, and would Netduino support it?

Quote from Chris Walker's post: "We're working on setting up a Wiki (sandbox.netduino.com)..."

[Corey Kosak]

My simple question is: would the members of this community like to see a wiki on Netduino...

I'd vote yes. The only thing I wish for Christmas is that I might never to have to use the current IPBoard forum software again.

[Chris Walker]

I'd vote yes. The only thing I wish for Christmas is that I might never to have to use the current IPBoard forum software again.

Hi Corey,

Just curious: what do you not like about the current IP.Board forum software? We're working on a transition plan to our new Chatter product for early next year, and would love to incorporate your ideas. You can create a new thread if you'd like, or PM me offline...

Chris

[Chris Walker]

Hi Quiche31, Great suggestions. What do you like, in particular, about the Wikis you mentioned? We're still sorting out the issues surrounding a Wiki, so this feedback is really valuable. Chris

[Quiche31]

Great suggestions. What do you like, in particular, about the Wikis you mentioned?

Chris, let me try to sort this out. Here are my top four:

1. A logical, easy to find, structure (and you don't need Wiki for this)
For example, consider the handbook, which displays this so logical top-down view with:(MCU presentation, troubleshooting section, library reference, implementation details)

2. Crystal-clear, consistent templates are used and encouraged for technical information. See for example this very typical page on Serial:
Hello world example (I love it, you'll find Hello world everywhere appropriate), pin out, API, details, references, see-also, complete example. Speaking of pin out, consider for example the usefulness of the pin out detailed on the Nokia LCD cookbook (recipe?) page. Indeed this is from Simon himself(the mbed's Chris, so to speak), but:

3. Any registered user can create a cookbook page (such as the one above) and refer it from the main cookbook page, that is indeed editable. For example, looking at 23K256 RAM, I can see that this is a contribution from a hobbyist, which doesn't quite follow the complete template, but still is helpful.

4. Any registered user can create and maintain his own notebook that contains current projects. Picking on the hobbyist above, here is his notebook

Last but not the least is how easy that is to import code into your own IDE. For example, from the Nokia LCD example above, just click on "Import this program" link, and you are brought to your own IDE with the option to import the very example that you just read as a compilable/runnable program. This icy on the cake is indeed reserved for a web hosted IDE in the cloud which is the case for mbed. I am not asking this for NETMF (but maybe Microsoft may consider to REST'ify VS2010!) .

Hope this helps
JP

[Chris Walker]

Quiche31, This is great feedback. Thank you. Please keep it coming... Chris

[kevintechie]

I think the best option would be Stack Exchange http://stackexchange.com/.

[Michel Tol]

I think the best option would be Stack Exchange http://stackexchange.com/.

Nice solution as well, but stackexchange is more problem - solution based approach instead of the wiki sharing info, code samples etc.
I don't think that the forum, wiki and the stack exchange could live side-by-side, the visitor would be lost possibilities to search.

anyway, just my 2 cents.

[Corey Kosak]

what do you not like about the current IP.Board forum software?

The biggest problem, as Quiche31 has pointed out so articulately, is that the communication model that it implements is a very poor fit for this community. I also have a lots of little problems with the software. Since you asked, I am happy to list them below, but they're really beside the point, because the "communication model" is the main issue.

Broadly, there are three communication styles that should be supported:

• Topical discussion threads
• Individual project pages, wiki-style, organized and managed by participant (e.g. kosak's projects, quiche31's projects)
• Informational pages (definitions, HOWTO's, walkthroughs, project classifications), also wiki-style, organized by topic and managed by volunteers.

The current software only supports the top one. The wiki pages would have the usual set of features (edit history, ability to add comments, etc).

Another way to understand the deficiency of the current system is with a little vignette. This past weekend I wanted to try to build the Netduino firmware but didn't know where to start. We don't have informational pages organized by topic (point 3), so I had to make do with what we have. I typed rebuild firmware into the search box on the forums, and got 87 results (this post will make it 88 :-).

The first disappointment is that the search function is an OR of the search terms (netduino OR firmware, i.e. useless). The second disappointment is that there is no Google-like summary of the posts in the search results page. So I scanned for headers and clicked through the promising ones hoping to find relevant ones. This process involves looking at a bunch of "topics" (i.e. conversational threads), each of which is ordered by time, but of course topic A may overlap in terms of time, participants, and material with topic B. So my task is to read through them all, mentally merging them while filtering out any out-of-date or contradictory information, and then cobble together a hypothesis about what are the right instructions to follow, what is the right compiler to use, and what are the right patches to apply.

Imagine how nice it would be if some contributor put together an excellent HOWTO which would provide the best, clearest recipe for building the firmware, perhaps documenting various approaches (gcc vs RVDS; use this patch; exlcude this patch, whatever) This would be awesome to put on the wiki. Another source of useful information would be to group projects into classifications, so if there were related projects using different approaches to accomplish the same goal (GPS receivers? executing native code? I2C? Step-by-step simple projects for first-timers? C# coding discussions?), they would be collected in one place and organized logically, and presented as a set of wiki pages with the usual conventions and features. It would be a nice repository of everything that we, the community, "know" about the Netduino, and it would be an excellent resource for a new person entering the community.

Oh, and you definitely want "tag" functionality. This offers a really flexible way to categorize information.

Personally I don't know which package is the best one out there. Your comment implied that you guys are writing your own board software, which seems like a strange choice to me. The state of the art is very far along, and it will be hard to catch up, and hard to properly define the requirements. But that's not really my business.

Finally, since you asked, the things I dislike about IP.Board:

• Search function is too primitive in many ways (does a poor job of finding relevant material)
• Notification options are too limited (e.g. I'd like to immediately receive a mail when there is a new post on a forum)
• no RSS support
• Bugs like this one.
• Corruption bugs like translating all lowercase b paren to uppercase b paren (see below)
• Weird caste system 1 (you can't use the IMG tag until you're an Advanced User)
• Weird caste system 2 (you transition from new user to regular user to advanced user based on post volume, I think)
• Board has small file storage quotas
• Board rejects files with certain extensions (like the ones that fritzing uses)
• Either Chris Walker is too busy to reply to my comments on our personal conversation page, or it is broken. I realize he is busy so I'm not demanding anything. But I also think there's a high enough probability that it is simply broken, that I wanted to mention it.

int ThisCodeCompiledBeforeIPBoardGotAHoldOfIt(int B) {
  return b;
}

[Chris Walker]

Corey, This is great feedback. Thank you, and please keep it coming. Also, on the last point...I'm a bit behind replying to PMs. I get a lot of PMs...sometimes it takes a few days to give them the attention they deserve. But I think that the PM system is working, as I keep receiving PM e-mails (this morning even). I'll see if there are any features in IP.Board that we can enable to support a few of your requests. Things like disabling automatic text conversion and flexible RSS feeds are high on my personal request list too. Chris

[Charles]

Thanks for killing the case sensitivity in searches - Already works better!

[VincentA]

did any one tried out avrfreaks.net ? In my opinion its really easy to use and find out projects. Can we have something like avrfreaks instead of a simple forum to post projects? Vincent