nitrousnrg wrote:Such an early stage documentation is an incredible pain too. Only if I have the right feedback soon enough it will worth the effort.
You'll get no feedback until you tell people how to use them...
it's not even a big deal to get it documented
I can't agree.
I handed it to you on a fucking platter, it took me maybe 15 mins to write that post with all the required sections laid out. I wrote all the notes on the things that I found that needed changing, you and others wrote the rest, COPY AND PASTE THEM INTO A PDF AND THEN IMPROVE UPON IT AFTERWARDS. It's childs stuff. Not difficult. The docs don't need to be perfectly formatted, or have perfect spelling or perfect grammar, they just need to be complete and accurate, and contain enough info to buy parts and assemble board. They DON'T need to contain info on how to get a board, people already have them!!! ETC.
but time that should have been spent on making the firmware accessible to real testers has been spent on revision after revision of MASSIVE changes into something that is being called spin2 but that is 90% different and should really be called something else all together and really requires a complete testing cycle as though there was no previous spin.
Fred, wtf, your
MASSIVE changes are the *adding* of 20 components or so, it makes 5% of the components, the rest are
MASSIVE layout changes and
MASSIVE footprint changes and
MASSIVE topology changes to make a more robust system; and the ign stuff.
Fixed. Those things may lead to it being more robust in the long term, but as a bug fix post release, RC style fix, they are EXTREME at best. Adding resistors is a small deal, changing the routing and so on and so forth for 90% of the board is a big deal and all needs testing. You've not got something that is the same as spin 1 with some fixes, you've got something totally different which needs from-scratch testing all over again.
For some of weeks I spent 30' per day just packaging boards, shipment costs came from my wallet since I can't use paypal for the postage, and the only one trying hard to assemble it is spudmn and he's having problems to get it running, I helped him as much as I could, and I will continue helping him.
How is this relevant? Spudmn is the exception, he has parts laying around, most people need to place an order, and to do that they need information, and first rate information.
Just make people start the build process before is too late.
Exactly. Get the docs good so THAT THEY CAN before it's too late.
At the rate things are going, when I get to Spain, I'll stop firmware dev completely, fork puma at spin1, fix the shit that is wrong, and do a reference design and distribute that myself, WITH docs. Spin 1, despite its flaws, was pretty close to what was required, Spin 2 seems to be diverging into an esoteric design, which is sad for me. It's your design, though, and your decision what you do with it, carry on as you wish.
You can make all of the excuses you like now, but the fact remains, puma has been in physical existence for THREE MONTHS, and if you'd spent 30mins a day working on documenting it, and feeding that to me for review through ANY medium, you'd have docs by now, and they'd be rock solid. (And this conversation wouldn't be happening) The truth is, you've been offline for extended periods, and I've not had that skype chat yet that I asked for several weeks ago. Communications from you, with the exception of the forum, have been weak/non existent, mostly.
Don't think I don't know what you've done, and don't value it, that's not true. You're definitely valued, without the hacked up board in my car right now, the firmware wouldn't be where it is, no question, but if you'd put the same time you put into helping me with my build, into documenting it for everyone, we'd have other testers by now. I have chat logs of how much time you spent helping me, and telling you to feed that help into docs way back then. You've just not done it, and you should have, and it wouldn't/won't have been/be hard, and it's needed...
TALK to me, when you can, and let US get it right TOGETHER. If you remain silent with commits coming from no where to the IRC logs when you're not logged in anywhere, then how can we converge on the desired result? We can't. Please, be in touch.
Fred.
