After-order experience

[maxwofford]

This is a proposed packet grant recipients get after we detect an order. It'd say something along the lines of:

• You ordered your board, now what?
• How to debug a design when you first get it
• How to iterate if your design failed

Tasks

Beta Give feedback

No tasks being tracked yet.

[johncohn]

We discussed.. I will do this as a 2 minute video. Target mid week of 7/24

[Lightshayan]

I like this idea - is it being implemented?

[LimesKey]

I think something like this would be really amazing, especially for more advanced designs and people who want to further take a dive at electrical engineering. But in my experience, there is a large gap in making a PCB and thinking you've done everything right, following documentation and such, but getting back something completely different than you expected and pondering where you've gone wrong.

Someone could then try to debug and re-iterate their design, but they're at a huge disadvantage for being a beginner or intermediate electrical engineer, the tools and facilities they have at their disposal. Correct me if I'm wrong, but to get kind of anywhere troubleshooting a design you need the bare minimum multimeter and preferably a soldering iron. More experienced people can have logic analyzers, oscilloscopes and much more that you almost are required to use for even something a little more advanced than basic with a microcontroller. A friend said this to me,

If I had a logic analyzer and/or oscilloscope, I could have figured out the problem. For all I knew with what I was doing (fumbling in the dark), the SPI bus might not have even been initialized properly - maybe no data was getting sent at all!

which is kind of what I'm experiencing right now...

I should say that my designs are a little more advanced maybe than most people's but I'm really not far off, I even have a lot of the basic tools (and some advanced) for troubleshooting electronics but for people without them, it's like what the friend said, "fumbling in the dark".

It would be interesting to see some sort of Hack Club effort funding experienced hack clubbers with an arsenal of physical hardware tools they need to go deeper into electrical projects. The Arcade definitely help a lot with this but I'd like to see some more variety in tools and guides on how to use them effectively.