I often find that long-running projects are quite impenetrable for outsiders who have not been following along from the beginning. For instance, try to learn about the xbox/playstation modding scene. It's all obvious if you've been into this stuff for 10 years, but if you just try to get a handle on things all you'll get is stuff like "It's easy, you'll have to unprotect your Virtual EEPROM with the Enigmah Engineering disc ftp'ed to your F-partition right after TSOP modding your 1.4 board with the nulled out UnleashX NDure mod patcher through Chimp while hot-swapping your IDE cable. The procedure is describe at <link to deleted forum post>".
I generally try to RTFM and google before I ask a question as writing it and then having other people read and respond to it is a waste of time for everybody. But here with this transistor tester after >1h of Googling I'm not really getting anywhere. It's such a rats nest of forum threads, AliExpress products, random stuff on GitHub, various PDF files, READMEs, SVN repos etc. I have no idea what's outdated or who's who and what any of this actually means.
Like, I've heard of this mysterious "m-firmware" and a google search gets me to this:
https://github.com/svn2github/transistortester/tree/master/Software/MarkusApparently the README should explain things. It does, if you already know the history of the project and who Karl-Heinz is and what he's been up to. Seems like he wrote this:
https://www.mikrocontroller.net/attachment/143813/TTester_096k.pdfwhich is neat and detailed, but it has 2012 in the title, so no idea if that still has any relevance to the current state of the code and whatever I can buy on AliExpress today.
There's some info on
https://www.mikrocontroller.net, but even that doesn't really help in telling the different hardware platforms apart, getting some kind of idea what the differences between the software releases are and what to actually buy.
Unless I'm being extremely dense here, the only way to know what the differences between the hardware and software releases are is either
- Spend days re-tracing the entire history of this project and read hundreds of pages of forum threads
- Ask the obvious questions (probably happens once a week) and hope somebody has pity on you
I think it would be super awesome if somebody in the know could just spend 5min writing a basic 'Buyers FAQ' with a last-updated date on it that just tells people what to buy. If there's more than a single obvious choice then maybe a paragraph of text and a little table on what the meaningful differences and trade-offs are between the different hardware / software releases so the buyer can make an informed choice. That probably be enough for 99% of the people looking to buy this thing and hopefully cut down the amount of repetitive stupid questions.