A lot of unanswered and unsolved questions

[LMI2]

The quality of this forum is low. Look at all the unsanwered posts (0 answers). Also sorting does not work. And this forum works differently than all the others.

[Rogers.Gary]

People come here for answers, some questions are more detailed, some are more "I don't know how to do this". Granted, many of the posts are incomplete and lack of detail in the question, so it is understandable they will not get many (if any at all) replies.

There are knowledgeable users here as well. Some of those users will not bother to help out those with "basic" questions even if they are well explained, because they are apparently above that. It is a struggle when you are facing time constraints to get answers, even if it is a basic question. Sometimes the obvious gets missed for the person asking. We were all there once, and many still are.

[Chris1]

You may imagine that representatives of ST provide support to their customers by answering questions on this forum.

That rarely happens.

[alister]

I'm relatively new to the STM32 community and like the OP was surprised to find so many posts unanswered.

I've learned much spending a few min each day reading answers by knowledgeable users, and I'll post too if I've knowledge to share.

To the developers: knowledgeable users have families to feed and mortgages to pay too. I'm grateful of their sharing. It's hard to answer posts and keep a project on schedule.

To ST: if you'd dedicate the engineers to answering posts, you'll see pay-back: reduced delays for developers = more MCUs shipped, and it'll compound because the developers would reuse the code, tools and MCU knowledge.

[MikeDB]

I'm going to take issue with the comments made. I recently changed from another brand of MCU to STM32 and had some fairly basic questions quickly answered which averted me needing to respin a PCB if I hadn't asked. Also if people ask questions on my own areas of expertise I try to help - for example recent questions on digital audio clocking and on interference on the SPI lines. Making comments saying that knowledgeable users 'don't bother' is likely to make those people wonder why they bother on this forum as all.

Also if you think ST don't bother supporting the forum, you should try the Atmel (ATMEGA/ATTINY/ATXMEGA) ones since Microchip took them over ! (but they were really good when Atmel were independent).

I think the one thing that does unite all MCU suppliers is that the current quality of all datasheets simply isn't good enough. I realise that the parts are far more complex than they were ten years ago, but surely that means suppliers need to put more resources into the datasheets, which in turn would cut the number of questions on forums like this.

[Rogers.Gary]

Lurkers in the shadows? LOL.

[Tesla DeLorean]

Forums are like a thankless purgatory, if there is a problem with the quality of answers its on the members of the community who have asymmetric participation, and the increasing level of devs who frankly don't seem to grasp some basic tenets of computer studies that I learned in high school some 35 years ago. Things like numeric representation and how data is stored in memory or files. I didn't have the internet, or YouTube, and limited access to books, so I have a very limited tolerance of whining about not being able to find anything after "days" of searching, or similar nonsense.

Presentations of problems and issues is extremely poor, and lacking in usable context. If you can't explain your situation clearly to another individual you're going to have serious problems finding the issues, or looking in the right place. Problems with low level code aren't going to be addressed by looking at clean top level code that just reports errors from below.

[AvaTar]

> Presentations of problems and issues is extremely poor, and lacking in usable context.

Exactly.

Many, if not most frequent poster are volunteers and not ST staff, and have a day job on their own.

This is just not the place to regurgitate basic math and electrical engineering fundamentals. over dozens of posts.

Not even to mention the supposedly entitled "do my homework now" crowd.

[Jack Peacock_2]

I do have some sympathy for the "do my homework" posts. Based on what I've seen from recent programmer interviews and their description of what passes for college level CS courses they do need some outside help. I never post code solutions but I do believe an explanation on how to approach the problem and ways to solve are of some worth, if not to a lazy student then hopefully someone else who bothered to do a search first.

Like Clive I started in high school, a bit more than his 35 years but we were on our own as far as learning how to program. An ASR33 (look that up) and a 110baud modem to an old Univac 1100 running Dartmouth BASIC was it. My first PC was a IMSAI, 2MHz Z80 and a huge 4KB of RAM, all assembled by hand from bare PCBs and bags of components. Programming consisted of entering binary machine language (assembler? are you kidding, those cost a fortune) through front panel switches. Results were displayed on 8 LEDs connected to a parallel port. There were no forums, no user groups, not much of anything except a couple of monthly magazines for help. Lack of necessity today does have its drawbacks. I still have that IMSAI, too much effort went into it to ever part ways.

Meanwhile, I have this project that will take about 50KLOC to solve. Can someone post the solution while I take the time off to play video games.....

Jack Peacock

[MikeDB]

I agree many courses nowadays are abysmal. There was a student on another forum a few weeks ago who was genuinely asking for help as he was stuck, and I actually wrote a couple of paragraphs for him to give to the lecturer pointing out how the question was flawed. It was so bad I couldn't even determine what the lecturer intended to ask, so all I could do was finish with a "did you mean a), b), c) or d) ??!!