Is it really this hard?
Posted: Sun Dec 05, 2021 12:18 pm
Normally, I check in at least once a day to see if there are any questions posted that I might be able to answer. After doing this for well over a year, I've noticed that many questions are posted by frustrated users who are really asking, "Is it really this hard"?
The easy answer is "No, it really isn't this hard"; but, then we all know that if we know how to do something, "it" is not hard. The hardness comes from trying to do something that we know too little about.
I've just recently revisited the resources that Centroidcnc has made available. They are excellent. They are not meant to be downloaded and then filed away. They are meant to be studied and pored over until they are fully understood. Many of the questions asked in the forum are answered in those resources. I know, I know, the excitement of getting an Acorn and getting that Acorn to work makes us too lazy to study things out first. That's human nature.
By reading the resources, I think that the nature of the questions would change. Instead of asking how to do something, the new user could tell us that he doesn't understand how to read schematics and needs some help. There was a time when each of us had to learn how to read schematics. We've been there. We know how it feels. We can answer that type of question. Or, if a new user asks us to help him understand how to read a stepper's data sheet or what a specific item on a stepper drive's data sheet means, we can help because we've all had that experience.
Maybe it's because I went to the school of hard knocks before there was an Internet, but somewhere along the way, I realized that if I had a question, I had to learn how to ask a proper question. The first time I called Geckodrive, I asked a question about steps-per-second. Marris Freimanis spent at least 10 minutes helping me. He started out by rephrasing my question to one that could be easily answered by anyone who understood stepper motors and stepper drivers. He taught me to ask the right kind of question. He made it easy to use his products.
I bought a lot of stepper motors from Oriental Motors. On a factory tour, the tour guide rephrased our questions so that we understood how to use their published information to get our answers.
The same thing happened when I visited Ampro, ProLog, Ziatech and many other companies. One time I was working on a large project using Borland's C++ compiler. After several months, I got a strange D-Word limit exceeded error. I called Borland. They said they had never had anyone call with that error. They told me that I had used up all the available D-Word space. I panicked. I had been paid a lot of money to do that project and I was far from finished. They asked me if I lived close by. I told them I was 850 miles away, but that I would be there in two days if they could help. They said they would try. When I got there, I was met by a friendly crowd who wanted to see the guy who broke their compiler. I showed them a printout of my code. One of their developers took the printout and returned thirty-minutes later. He showed me that I had declared thousands of individual variables and that by using individual variables, I had used up all the space needed to declare those variables. He showed me how to group the variables into arrays. Problem solved.
Now, with the Internet, we too often ask questions first and think later. Most of the "fun" of building a controller is learning all that there is to learn about everything about everything in that controller.
The resources are available. Questions will be answered on the forum even if the answer can easily be found by reading the resources; but, learning to do our own homework is part of the process of being a true DIYer.
The easy answer is "No, it really isn't this hard"; but, then we all know that if we know how to do something, "it" is not hard. The hardness comes from trying to do something that we know too little about.
I've just recently revisited the resources that Centroidcnc has made available. They are excellent. They are not meant to be downloaded and then filed away. They are meant to be studied and pored over until they are fully understood. Many of the questions asked in the forum are answered in those resources. I know, I know, the excitement of getting an Acorn and getting that Acorn to work makes us too lazy to study things out first. That's human nature.
By reading the resources, I think that the nature of the questions would change. Instead of asking how to do something, the new user could tell us that he doesn't understand how to read schematics and needs some help. There was a time when each of us had to learn how to read schematics. We've been there. We know how it feels. We can answer that type of question. Or, if a new user asks us to help him understand how to read a stepper's data sheet or what a specific item on a stepper drive's data sheet means, we can help because we've all had that experience.
Maybe it's because I went to the school of hard knocks before there was an Internet, but somewhere along the way, I realized that if I had a question, I had to learn how to ask a proper question. The first time I called Geckodrive, I asked a question about steps-per-second. Marris Freimanis spent at least 10 minutes helping me. He started out by rephrasing my question to one that could be easily answered by anyone who understood stepper motors and stepper drivers. He taught me to ask the right kind of question. He made it easy to use his products.
I bought a lot of stepper motors from Oriental Motors. On a factory tour, the tour guide rephrased our questions so that we understood how to use their published information to get our answers.
The same thing happened when I visited Ampro, ProLog, Ziatech and many other companies. One time I was working on a large project using Borland's C++ compiler. After several months, I got a strange D-Word limit exceeded error. I called Borland. They said they had never had anyone call with that error. They told me that I had used up all the available D-Word space. I panicked. I had been paid a lot of money to do that project and I was far from finished. They asked me if I lived close by. I told them I was 850 miles away, but that I would be there in two days if they could help. They said they would try. When I got there, I was met by a friendly crowd who wanted to see the guy who broke their compiler. I showed them a printout of my code. One of their developers took the printout and returned thirty-minutes later. He showed me that I had declared thousands of individual variables and that by using individual variables, I had used up all the space needed to declare those variables. He showed me how to group the variables into arrays. Problem solved.
Now, with the Internet, we too often ask questions first and think later. Most of the "fun" of building a controller is learning all that there is to learn about everything about everything in that controller.
The resources are available. Questions will be answered on the forum even if the answer can easily be found by reading the resources; but, learning to do our own homework is part of the process of being a true DIYer.