EEVblog Electronics Community Forum

Well that idea certainly is interesting, but bear in mind, that this must have "profits" (not necessarily money) or advantages for both the circuit author and Dave to do so.

Imagine some user do have their own website.  Advertising only the schematic (linking to the forum) might not be nice against the author. But it depends on the author what will he agree to.  And now imagine that 100 circuits authors equals 100 different requirements on how things should be published and blabla... I do not think this is a very viable option for anyone to go through.

There already are some threads here about peoples electronics channels on youtube and maybe even their websites. Just look it up. I guess you will quickly find and interesting stash of learning materials.

y.

Quote from: jonovid on December 27, 2017, 01:08:47 pm

Should eevblog publish its own in house catalogue or page of diy circuit schematics
by uses of the forum?
-of course it must be copyright free 
so us electronics hobbyist's, and the less electronically skilled of us, can get good reliable tested circuits. that are copyright free
for just the cost of a pcb. that are uptodate.  simple circuits are the best. but must be reliable tested circuits. willing to share with others in the forum.  something that works.

Why on Earth would you want reliable circuits to learn? You want unreliable circuits or outright broken ones. That's how you learn!

yes I can find lots of unreliable circuits on other websites and most are not contemporary. and yes  that's how you learn 
a page of diy circuits ..........   just an idea 

Every site I have belonged to has implemented a similar idea be it for circuits, code, product evaluations, and so forth, and they all fail in short order.  Typically, the endeavor begins with a lot of enthusiasm and after that dies, no one  checks to see if the list still exists.  New posters and even more experienced posters don't check because there is no index and no way to tell chaff from the grain.

The basic idea appeals to me.  In chemistry, there are compendiums of synthetic methods, all of which have been independently validated.  They are quite useful to both beginners and experts alike.  Examples are Synthetic Methods, Feiser & Feiser: Reagents for Organic Synthesis, and others.

My suggestions:
1) How will the circuits be indexed? (I consider this the most important element missing from failed attempts.)

It is probably unlikely that all or even most circuits will be validated independently given the way blogs work. So,
2) How will submissions be evaluated for acceptance?
3) How will comments be edited?

Regards,

On one hand I do see it as something that is needed (known working projects, rather than the incomplete, poorly documented, or just plain fake ones).
I've gotten really annoyed when I think I've found something good, but the part values aren't given, or the entire thing is clearly untested as would never work.

But....
I don't wish Dave the problems that occur when you release a tutorial for something, on the internet.
Expect a flood of comments/emails like:
a) Please email the project files for this to... email address (ever though the bloody files are in plain sight for download).
b) Can you make a schematic for XYZ (something completely unrelated to the original project)
c) Can you do my homework for me (FFS)
d) I can't get half the parts for this project, can I use other random stuff listed below instead ? (yeah good luck answering that)

If you are one of the people that do these sorts of comments I hate you. Being so annoying to others that give up making any more videos/tutorials is bad.

Given how easy it is to find Dave's email, or the EEVblog forum, I'd recommend making a stand alone website, with no comments or email addresses. Perhaps EEVblog forum users could be the ones that sift through everything to check for mistakes or junk projects, in their chosen area of interest.

Quote from: jonovid on December 27, 2017, 01:08:47 pm

Should eevblog publish its own in house catalogue or page of diy circuit schematics
by uses of the forum?
-of course it must be copyright free 
so us electronics hobbyist's, and the less electronically skilled of us, can get good reliable tested circuits. that are copyright free
for just the cost of a pcb. that are uptodate.  simple circuits are the best. but must be reliable tested circuits. willing to share with others in the forum.  something that works.

Why on Earth would you want reliable circuits to learn? You want unreliable circuits or outright broken ones. That's how you learn!

I've never been a subscriber to the "learn by failing" school of thought.

In many cases, people with no Technical knowledge find some fundamentally flawed circuit, fall in love with it, & try to make it work.
After a lot of "trial & error" they go on this forum & try to dragoon members into diagnosing the problem(s).

When they are told that the thing is unworkable, they become incensed & either stomp off or start making personal attacks on the members that tried to help them!

There's the sadly underutilised EEVblog Resource Wiki.   If there was an easy procedure in place to get pages added to it, and some defence against numpties and vandals wrecking pages faster than we can maintain them (e.g. limit edits to registered forum members in good standing, based on whatever forum metrics the admins prefer), then it could easily be used for crowd-sourced index pages for the forum.

That got destroyed by the spam bots so I had to turn off all access.
If there was some way (and I'm sure there is) to automatically give access to SMF forum members using their existing forum login then it could potentially work well.
That would be a fully custom coding solution though.

It would be awesome if the the Wiki integrated the look and feel of the forum like is does on SMF's website:
http://wiki.simplemachines.org/

But I'm not sure if they have released the templates or whatnot for that?

I don't see (forum software) that helps a community to build things. As one example, members all have equal rights.
Whether noob or troll or expert EE, experience/education level is weighed the same.

Next level, social media tries to use "upvotes" or "karma" points to filter out the noise. But here, the only hierarchy is based on respect and knowing who is a reasonable voice.

How would circuits by members be known to be any good? It could be an endless troll-fest complaining and nit picking from people who don't even own a soldering iron.
People have their own blog or website when they build circuits, mostly to boost their ego or show off 
So I'm wondering how EEVblog helps it out.

SMF seems really limited, is it evolving much? A quick glance at vBulletin and it looked like more lively add ons.
Although I haven't seen a (software) solution for organizing crowd sourcing. A zillion crowdFUNDING sites, but nothing for the design team.

I don't think a Wiki's going to do it.

It's just a centralized document. Flat levels of access so anyone can modify it, regardless of skill level.
A battle over content results and I think it needs hierarchy and leadership, and donations lol.
"This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed."

We're just going to have acres of haggling over math, physics, thermodynamics, electronics on a circuit? I dunno.

"Most people, when they first learn about the wiki concept, assume that a Web site that can be edited by anybody would soon be rendered useless by destructive input. It sounds like offering free spray cans next to a grey concrete wall. The only likely outcome would be ugly graffiti and simple tagging, and many artistic efforts would not be long lived. Still, it seems to work very well."

I'm not convinced it works well, electronics/a circuit is much more complex than an encyclopedia definition.

Confluence shines at this sort of thing, but I doubt it'd work in a public setting, not to mention licensing issues.

Quote from: Mr. Scram on December 27, 2017, 01:40:12 pm

Why on Earth would you want reliable circuits to learn? You want unreliable circuits or outright broken ones. That's how you learn!

If you mean you don't learn much by simply duplicating others' work, true. However, there is a need for pointers in the right direction as to how to design things. Otherwise you just spend countless hours of frustration and never achieve a good result.

Examples of that are the number of experimenters who have power transistors blow repeatedly because they don't understand thermal design. Or, the ones who run multivibrators from 12v supplies and wonder why the frequency varies all over the place. On their own they may never figure out why. With a few pointers as to correct design principles they avoid these gotchas.

OK, fair enough about the thermal design of transistor power stages, but you lost me with the
multivibrators.
Apart from multivibrators being far from the most frequency stable devices at any time, why should 12v supplies cause any particular problems, if they are well regulated supplies in the first place?

Quote from: vk6zgo on December 29, 2017, 11:36:50 am

Quote from: IanMacdonald on December 29, 2017, 09:12:32 am

Or, the ones who run multivibrators from 12v supplies and wonder why the frequency varies all over the place. On their own they may never figure out why. With a few pointers as to correct design principles they avoid these gotchas.

OK, ... you lost me with the multivibrators.
Apart from multivibrators being far from the most frequency stable devices at any time, why should 12v supplies cause any particular problems, if they are well regulated supplies in the first place?

Because when the supply voltage exceeds the actual reverse Vbe Zener breakdown voltage by more than about 1V, when the transistor turning on pulls the collector end of the opposite transistor's timing capacitor low, it reverse biasses the opposite transistor's Vbe junction enough to Zener it. (The extra 1V is from 0.7V forward Vbe initially on the transistor base, and 0.3V Vce_sat limiting the swing).   This makes the timing significantly sensitive to the supply voltage, and also tends to degrade the transistors - an order of magnitude reduction in h_FE in under 1000 hours would not be exceptional.

(See http://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/apec/2001/053209.pdf for a report on the degradation of 2N2222 transistors by reverse Vbe Zenering)

The easy cure in a multivibrator circuit is to add a diode in series with each base.

That's a common error.

Another cause of the frequency being excessively sensitive to changes in supply voltage, is when the standard astable multi-vibrator is used to drive LEDs directly, especially when the V_F is higher, in the case of two or more LEDs connected in series.