text:
Please welcome your new moderators!
First off, thanks to everyone who participated at the Provisional Community Moderator Nominations meta post.
I may eventually be contacting additional users to fill more moderator slots, but I wanted to get the folks below activated before things really started to take off.
Throughout the beta, we need members from this site whose focus is to engage the community, both in community-building issues and site management. That's why we select a few members from each community to act as temporary, provisional Moderators. You can read about the program here: Moderators Pro Tempore.
I am pleased to announce that these members have stepped up and generously volunteered their time to help us assure that this community’s issues are properly addressed:

We want to make this site a huge success, and these members are great examples of exactly the type of people we need to make this site succeed. Please welcome them for the hard work and time they contribute.
Did I overlook anyone?
Yes, almost certainly. At the nomination post alone, there were more great choices than positions available. There are members who are actively involved and very deserving of recognition. My inability to account for everyone this early on is in no way a slight against them. Ideally, Moderators are elected by the community and that's why you'll have your elections several weeks after graduation.
Most of all, be respectful and understanding of the Moderators Pro Tem. Members of your community are volunteering their time and learning on the job. It’s a learning experience for everyone.

Congrats to all! I'm sure you'll do a great job!

That was quick! Congratulations to everybody!

Congratulations, folks! Use your new powers wisely. We'll be watching :D

Thanks everybody!

I would be interested in being a Mod. Please contact me so i don't miss another nomination post (i was only gone 2 days)

@TheDoctor What does being gone two days have to do with it? It was up for a week. I do however agree that the nomination post should have been more prominent. By the time I saw the post, Peter, Sachleen, and Chris already had so many votes that I had no chance of catching up when I nominated myself.

@TheGuywithTheHat - i never saw it until it was over :(

@TheGuyWithTheHat What are you talking about? It was make [tag:featured] on the 24th, a day after the nominations thread had been posted. This is five days after the nominations thread has been posted.

@TheDoctor See my comment above this one.

@AnnonomusPerson Featured != Always noticed, and it's been a lot longer than five days since it was posted

@TheGuy I always notice the featured questions, but I also notice things that others don't. :) But I was refering for the five days from when it was posted to when this was posted.


text:
Q&A Series Ideas
We had a discussion in the Pin 13 chat room after this question was posted about starting a Q&A series.
This question is asking a very broad question that can't (and shouldn't) be covered in one answer. AsheeshR suggested the following:

For the library case, we could broadly cover:

How do i create the files? (done)
How do convert a sketch into a C library?
How do I convert a sketch into a C++ library?
How do I package a library and share it with others?

The second question could further be broken down to:

How do variables interact amongst a .cpp and .h file?
How do function definitions in a .cpp and .h file work?
How do I hide local functions in my .cpp file?

etc.

chat transcript
How interested would you guys be in doing a series like this?
What are some other ideas for a Q&A series?

Don't do things covered in many tutorials. Try to stay away from resistors or LEDs; those are everywhere on the web. If you want to go into a rotary encoder or a LCD display, go ahead. Try not to duplicate basic content.

Yes, I agree entirely with @AnnonomusPerson . We should do these in cases where the available tutorials are poor, and we have some value to add (i.e. write a better guide, or maybe fill in gaps in existing tutorials).

The second question seems clearly outside the scope of arduino.SE since it is purely related to C++. The first question is more related to Arduino (IDE in particular), although bullets 2 and 3 would be more about program design (and OOO-design for bullet 3)

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

sort: votes


text:
Project Showcase '14 Winners!

Thanks to everyone for submitting a project to our first Arduino Day Project Showcase. With 14 submissions we think it was a success! Here are the winners:

Energy saver for the absent minded PC user - jippie
Stateful questbox - hithwen

The winner (jippie) will receive an official Stack Exchange t-shirt and the runner up (hithwen) gets the 100 rep bounty.
Congratulations to both winners! We would also like to thank everyone for participating!

Hope summer comes early this year ;o)

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


text:
Are questions that are only related to Arduino by the parts used on topic?
Mainly referring to this question: Which voltage regulator should I use? [on hold]
Currently it's put on hold (by me) and has 3 re-open votes from the community so it's obviously worth a discussion to determine what direction the community wants to take this SE in.
The fact that it's an Arduino clone is not relevant to the question. The question is what voltage regulator should I use to get the most out of this battery while still being able to supply X volts and Y current.
When phrased this way, it's obviously off topic. But why does it become on topic if I mention the board I'm trying to power is an Arduino? Take a look at the answers to both Arduino.SE question and the EE.SE question. None of them mention Arduino, at all.
We've had a couple of other discussions regarding other topics but they all have the same theme:

Are questions about serial communication using third party software on-topic?
Are questions about IDEs other than the official IDE on-topic?

My policy is this:

Ask "What does this have to do with Arduino?" and if the answer to
  that question is not significant enough, then the question is probably
  off topic. https://arduino.meta.stackexchange.com/a/52/11

Although I tend to agree with the policy you mentioned:

Ask "What does this have to do with Arduino?" and if the answer to
  that question is not significant enough, then the question is probably
  off topic. https://arduino.meta.stackexchange.com/a/52/11

That policy is still quite subjective (how would you quantify "is not significant enough"?) and allows for different interpretations for a given question.
In the specific question aforementioned, I would keep it on-topic for the following reasons:

some answers may be Arduino-specific (or in this case, RFDuino-specific), e.g. there could be some specific way to provide current to the board and keep low-power consumption
the answer may require specific Arduino knowledge, as any datasheet only generally specifies min or max values; but nothing values real-life experience on the board to determine actual power needs
people who can potentially answer this question (i.e. people who already used an RFDuino and have faced the same decision in the past) are more likely to be found on Arduino.SE than EE.SE; as a matter of fact, that's my personal situation, although I do have an account on EE.SE, I almost never go there.


text:
Let's get critical: Aug 2014 Site Self-Evaluation
We all love Arduino Stack Exchange, but there is a whole world of people out there who need answers to their questions and don't even know that this site exists. When they arrive from Google, what will their first impression be? Let's try to look at this site through the eyes of someone who's never seen it before, and see how we stack up against the rest of the 'Net.
The Site Self-Evaluation review queue is open and populated with 10 questions that were asked and answered in the last quarter.
Run a few Google searches to see how easy they are to find and compare the answers we have with the information available on other sites.
Rating the questions is only a part of the puzzle, though. Do you see a pattern of questions that should have been closed but are not? Questions or answers that could use an edit? Anything that's going really well? Post an answer below to share your thoughts and discuss these questions and the site's health with your fellow users!

Final Results

MCU Type ATmega16U2 not avaliable in Eclipse AVR Plugin

Net Score: 6 (Excellent: 6, Satisfactory: 1, Needs Improvement: 0)

How to use two Sonar's

Net Score: 4 (Excellent: 5, Satisfactory: 2, Needs Improvement: 1)

What is the frequency of PWM output on Arduino

Net Score: 4 (Excellent: 5, Satisfactory: 1, Needs Improvement: 1)

Is programming the ATTiny85 possible in 1.5?

Net Score: 2 (Excellent: 3, Satisfactory: 5, Needs Improvement: 1)

Disable Boot Flash completely on ATMega

Net Score: 1 (Excellent: 2, Satisfactory: 5, Needs Improvement: 1)

How can I make my Arduino code work?

Net Score: 1 (Excellent: 2, Satisfactory: 5, Needs Improvement: 1)

nRF24L01+ (RF24) radio with Arduino Micro

Net Score: 0 (Excellent: 2, Satisfactory: 3, Needs Improvement: 2)

Arduino UNO USB not recognized

Net Score: 0 (Excellent: 0, Satisfactory: 3, Needs Improvement: 0)

Can I control analog IO pins using Yun Linux

Net Score: -1 (Excellent: 2, Satisfactory: 2, Needs Improvement: 3)

Need some help with controlling a fan through PWM

Net Score: -1 (Excellent: 1, Satisfactory: 2, Needs Improvement: 2)

Nice eval, everyone!

First impressions:
Positive:

We have a lot of great answers that provide useful information.
For some questions, I could use basic search terms for a subject and see our site as the second or third item on the list.

Negative:

I noticed that the quality of the questions could be improved. We don't have a lot of edits
Our tagging could be improved. For example, a lot of scenarios there is either no board tag or there are multiple board tags when the question only relates to one board. Plus, there are some questions that only use the tag "Arduino-Uno"

Other thoughts:

Although this isn't directly related to the quality of the site, I noticed that a lot of questions were hard to find online because they were primarily code based, thus it is very hard to have an identical situation. I think this is just a flaw in the SE benchmark system, not with out site quality.

Other than that, I thought most of the questions selected were quality. I do think we need to have more users working to edit, close, and retag questions to improve the general grammatical elements and the appearance of the content. We might have to establish better tagging guidelines (using meta).
What can you do?

If you see a bad question, edit it. If the tags are wrong, retag it! (If you don't have 2K to do this, try doing something else with the post or just leave it).
If you're not sure what should be done but know that it isn't right, don't be afraid to ask in chat or in meta. Meta is the foundation that allows the rest of the site to grow.


text:
Let's get critical: Feb 2015 Site Self-Evaluation
We all love Arduino Stack Exchange, but there is a whole world of people out there who need answers to their questions and don't even know that this site exists. When they arrive from Google, what will their first impression be? Let's try to look at this site through the eyes of someone who's never seen it before, and see how we stack up against the rest of the 'Net.
The Site Self-Evaluation review queue is open and populated with 10 questions that were asked and answered in the last quarter.
Run a few Google searches to see how easy they are to find and compare the answers we have with the information available on other sites.
Rating the questions is only a part of the puzzle, though. Do you see a pattern of questions that should have been closed but are not? Questions or answers that could use an edit? Anything that's going really well? Post an answer below to share your thoughts and discuss these questions and the site's health with your fellow users!

Final Results

Increasing payload size above 32 bytes using nRF24L01+

Net Score: 6 (Excellent: 6, Satisfactory: 2, Needs Improvement: 0)

Can I use the setup() function inside the loop() function

Net Score: 5 (Excellent: 5, Satisfactory: 2, Needs Improvement: 0)

Serial debug output looking messy

Net Score: 0 (Excellent: 1, Satisfactory: 3, Needs Improvement: 1)

5 Switches 1 AI pin

Net Score: 0 (Excellent: 1, Satisfactory: 1, Needs Improvement: 1)

How to send Json to a webservice from pc/RPI with live data from Arduino(serial)

Net Score: 0 (Excellent: 1, Satisfactory: 1, Needs Improvement: 1)

Audio Frequency White Noise generation using Arduino Mini Pro

Net Score: -2 (Excellent: 1, Satisfactory: 3, Needs Improvement: 3)

Get the distance to non perpendicular surface

Net Score: -2 (Excellent: 0, Satisfactory: 2, Needs Improvement: 2)

Wake up atmel-328 with external interrupt.

Net Score: -4 (Excellent: 0, Satisfactory: 0, Needs Improvement: 4)

Servo motor swinging back to 0°

Net Score: -5 (Excellent: 0, Satisfactory: 3, Needs Improvement: 5)

Read temperature (DS18B20) with the ATTiny85

Net Score: -5 (Excellent: 0, Satisfactory: 1, Needs Improvement: 5)

Serial debug output looking messy: Satisfactory. A great answer but required obscure search terms.
How to send Json to a webservice from pc/RPI with live data from Arduino(serial): Skipped. It needs to be closed because it's off topic and cross posted with Stack Overflow. I chose not A lesson to learn here is that you should not recommend posting on other sites until after closing it or you should flag it to get migrated.
Can I use the setup() function inside the loop() function: Excellent. Third result (not the first above the fold) in Google and it had the best answers that I could find. The first one was Arduino documentation that was unrelated, a second one was the Arduino forum with incomplete answer(s), and the third one was us.
Get the distance to non perpendicular surface: Needs improvement. Hard to find, no good answers.
Audio Frequency White Noise generation using Arduino Mini Pro: Satisfactory. Shows up high in search rankings but the answer selection could be improved. [SEE POINT #1]
Servo motor swinging back to 0°: Needs improvement. No answer that fixes the OP's problem (in my opinion).
5 Switches 1 AI pin: Satisfactory. It directly answers the question, but is a bit hard to find. Could use some editing.
Increasing payload size above 32 bytes using nRF24L01+: Excellent. Highest in search rankings, good answer.
Wake up atmel-328 with external interrupt.: Needs improvement. This question didn't seem to have a quality answer posted.
Read temperature (DS18B20) with the ATTiny85: Needs improvement. This question didn't seem to have a question
What we can take away from this:

We need to do a better job editing new posts to make higher quality (which might help some with SEO).
We need to answer more questions (hard to really improve).
We need to close questions efficiently. This is just more of a close a post when you see an off topic post kind-of-thing.

+1 for performing the evaluation exactly as instructed. Nice going! I also agree with all points you propose. A good starting point would be for us to attend to the review queues, that are starting to pile up with review items.

@Ricardo yes they are, and I think skips are part of the issue. However, we should remind people about them definitely.

Wake up atmel-328 with external interrupt.: Needs improvement. - I had another look at that. I think the question is more-or-less unanswerable. There is no schematic, no code. The OP also mentions a "server" with no details about that. I'm going to close it as "too broad" - maybe the OP will clarify what it is all about.

Related:
Questions are being sent
EE -> Arduino and
Arduino -> EE
without adequate reason
and even yesterday
EE ->Arduino -> EE.
At least it got back to EE which it should never have left
BUT there are usually intelligent people who have a literally blind hatred for Arduinos  who go out of their way to make life hard for Arduino users and to abuse them and trash Arduinos generally.
The intended ethos of the SE sites is not well enough understood. In one recent example (last few days) a user double posted on two SE pages and somebody voted to close on one page where they had adequate rep and stated the question should be closed on both as punishment for double posting. That MAY have been an EE - Engineering crossover but the same ill will exists between EE & Arduino.
Better promulgation of the Stack Exchange treatment and behaviour rules' is in order.

I don't remember seeing many questions going from Arduino to EE. Do you have any specific examples that you feel were inappropriately migrated from here?


text:
What should we do with the Arduino.cc promotion link?
A while ago, when i proposed this site, i put up a link on the Arduino playground to the Area 51 proposal of Arduino:

Now that we're public, should i change it to link to he actual site? Should i delete it entirely?
Note: i will make the necessary changes once we arrive at a conclusion.

Definitely change it to the main site now. Don't delete it as it's good promotion of the site.

It's down at the bottom in small print. Should i change this also?

@TheDoctor Yes, definitely. (As long as you don't get in any trouble) It is good advertising and we need traffic, especially since currently we're not in Google.

OK, edited! http://playground.arduino.cc/

AskUbuntu was launched by Stack Exchange and Canonical and is now linked to prominently from the top bar of Ubuntu.com

Ask Ubuntu is also linked to from the installation GUI. This is beneficial for the site as it generates a lot of traffic.
I think we should also aim for more visibility within the Arduino platform.
We should be here:

Also, if you open the Arduino IDE, it links back to Arduino.cc from the Help menu. We should be there as well, alongside Arduino.cc
Both of these however, are more long term goals, and will most likely require the support of Stack Exchange, due to Arduino trademark issues.

That's outside my range of edification

Found this question again, but the reason it's there is because Canonical had a special agreement with SE. I'm sure if Arduino SE permitted, we could get that, but (as of now) we aren't any official support.


text:
Why isn't our Twitter account tweeting?
So we have a Twitter account, @StackArduino. However, it hasn't tweeted, has no profile picture, and isn't linked to anywhere. Why is this, and can the account be "activated"?

There are more upvotes on this question, than there are followers on the Twitter account :)

Ah, that would ultimately be an oopsie on our end. We had it configured properly (yay), but almost immediately something happened to un-configure it (ugh), and we didn't re-configure it (d'oh). It has just been fixed, and should be working soon!


text:
2019 Moderator Election Q&A - Question Collection
Arduino is scheduled for an election next week, May 13. In connection with that, we will be holding a Q&A with the candidates. This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic of moderation.  Participation is completely voluntary.
Here's how it'll work:

Until the nomination phase, (so, until May 13 at 20:00:00Z UTC, or 4:00 pm EDT on the same day, give or take time to arrive for closure), this question will be open to collect potential questions from the users of the site. Post answers to this question containing any questions you would like to ask the candidates. Please only post one question per answer.
We, the Community Team, will be providing a small selection of generic questions. The first two will be guaranteed to be included, the latter ones are if the community doesn't supply enough questions. This will be done in a single post, unlike the prior instruction.
If your question contains a link, please use the syntax of [text](link), as that will make it easier for transcribing for the finished questionnaire.
This is a perfect opportunity to voice questions that are specific to your community and issues that you are running into at currently.
At the start of the nomination phase, the Community Team will select up to 8 of the top voted questions submitted by the community provided in this thread, to use in addition to the aforementioned 2 guaranteed questions. We reserve some editorial control in the selection of the questions and may opt not to select a question that is tangential or irrelevant to moderation or the election.
Once questions have been selected, a new question will be opened to host the actual questionnaire for the candidates, typically containing 10 questions in total.
This is not the only option that users have for gathering information on candidates. As a community, you are still free to, for example, hold a live chat session with your candidates to ask further questions, or perhaps clarifications from what is provided in the Q&A.

If you have any questions or feedback about this process, feel free to post as a comment here.

Here is a set of general questions, gathered as very common questions asked every election. As mentioned in the instructions, the first two questions are guaranteed to show up in the Q&A, while the others are if there aren't enough questions (or, if you like one enough, you may split it off as a separate answer for review within the community's 8).

How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?
How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?

In your opinion, what do moderators do?
A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?
In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?

A question has a lengthy number of comments under it suggesting various possible solutions to the asked problem. Once the number of comments reaches 20 the system (Community) automatically flags it suggesting that the comments be moved to chat. You move the comments to chat as suggested, and then get a complaint from a user that "valuable information is now hidden away in chat rather than under the question where it should be". How do you respond?

my question:
How will you handle questions that doesn't require knowledge about the Arduino platform to answer (general coding questions, general electronics questions)?

A question is flagged as "off-topic" because it only peripherally involves an Arduino. For example "How do I get my Arduino to turn on a motor using a transistor?". Should it be closed altogether, migrated to Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange (where they are used to questions about transistors), or left here as a good beginner's Arduino question? Alternatively would you dismiss the flag and let the community handle the question via down-votes or vote-to-close?

I suggested this last election, but I think it is an OK question to use again.

my question 2:
How would you prefer to handle a Question, if the source of the problem is only a typo in the OP's source code?

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
How do I describe or draw my circuit in such a way that everybody understands what I am building?
How do I describe or draw my circuit in such a way that everybody understands what I am building? On EE.SE there is this circuit editor available to quickly draw a circuit, I'd propose to have that here too.
There are not many questions on the Arduino stack yet, but I invite everybody to add example questions that would benefit from a circuit editor in the answers below.

It should be allowed to use Circuit-Lab here too.

@RobertCartaino I deliberately asked for example questions in the comments, so they can be added to the question text. The example questions are hardly worth an answer. You seem to disagree, what is your vision on this?

Comments are used to ask for clarification or suggest improvements to a post.  Comments simply were not designed to be used the way you suggest. But posting 'answers' lets folks vote to gauge their usefulness. Answers allow wiki-style editing to add to and improve those answers where needed. Answers also have their own comments if users have questions or suggestions. Comments provide none of those capabilities. Comments are ephemeral by design; they may even become hidden if too many comments are added to the post.

Another typical example of where circuit diagrams are required. http://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/876/project-showcase-14

http://i.imgur.com/glcclTu.jpg

YES!
We really do need Circuit-Lab on here. This is enabled on EE.SE. So as to your feature-request, could the team pretty please consider enabling Circuit-Lab on here?
I would personally use this on wiring questions, or anything that needs an electrical schematic. The Stack Exchange team looks for questions/posts that would benefit by having Circut-Lab, so let's make a list of such posts/questions.
Some questions that could use this:

Is there a way to have more than 14 Output pins on arduino?
Possibly Arduino Uno R2 and Ethernet Shield R3 compatibility
How to interface to LPG consumption meter
How to switch an external circuit with Arduino?

This is community wiki, so if you see something that would be good for this list, add it!

YES!
We really do need Circuit-Lab on here. The Arduino is more than just code. It is hardware, software, IDE and core libraries. This SE needs efficient/effective methods to communicate all of these functions of the Arduino eco's or framework.
Note SO's arduino tab has many questions with long winded descriptions of circuits, that work in conjunction with code. Where it would be best described with a schematic from Circuit-Lab. A picture is really worth a thousand words.
Often with these cases. The comments explode and drag out with simple questions about what was omitted in the written description. Causing the question to be answered in the comments and not with a clear answer, if at all. In these cases a schematic would provide better questions and result in better answers.
As the answers should also allow Circuit-Lab too.

I can't help but notice that you copied exactly the first two sentences of hichris123's answer.

It was well put. Where I believe I immediately went into additional value added content.

Another question that benefits from a decent circuit editor: How to switch an external circuit with Arduino?
This is typically what happens when none is available. Now I have to grab pen and paper and follow the description word for word while drawing what I think the author meant. Someone else may draw another circuit. And the people who answer, need to make descriptive text too so the OP can grab a piece of paper in turn to try understand what the answerer tried to capture in words.

Fritzing appears to be the official standard for Arduino circuits. (Site currently mostly down at the moment.)

Beware that the Fritzing wiring diagrams are not really useful for sharing the circuit diagram, they are useful for reproduction of the circuit. You need datasheets for all components handy to interpret how it is connected and the result will be hard to follow. I saw Fritzing also allows for circuit diagrams, but I don't know how well that integrates with the site.

I would think cross compatibility between EE.SE's C-L would be beneficial.

@jippie - You know that EE.SE has a (kind of) standard of asking posters to include proper schematics (with component descriptors and all). That's great and I think we should have the same here, but I honestly thought that Fritzing diagrams could be ok, too, just so we make the transition easier for the less experienced. Arduino sites use it for a reason. What do you all think?

@Ricardo it is not just the asking posters that may want to include a quick diagram. Anyways, I'm not trying to say one is better than the other, my point is that it would really help to have an easy way to include circuit diagrams in questions and answers.

One thing to add: Fritzing screenshot could be useful. No need to do a full schematic for a simple LED demonstration (say "Do I really need a resistor?") to add color, but then for more advanced projects request that the OP draws a schematic using Circuit-Lab or using the "schematic" tab on Fritzing and taking a screenshot there. Screenshots are the only option until the dev team implements anything: that is if they do ever.

@jippie hmmmmm. Your question had a hole, you should've said "how do I draw a circuit so eerybody understands on this site", that might've indicate this answerer that you are asking a different question.

Another typical example of where circuit diagrams are required. Project Showcase '14
Every answer with that should probably ultimately contain a circuit diagram.

simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab
While I generally agree with Pops, I looked at some of the other sites with this setting enabled:

Amateur Radio
Raspberry Pi
EE

It seems to me that the list fits into what you might call hobbyist electronics/embedded systems sites. So I'm a little more convinced the feature will be used for good and not ill.

Try to use schem-it for online or you could try using an offline circuit simulator just like multisim and circuit wizard.@

Shown below is a simple schematic created with CircuitLab, which is a drawing and simulation package referred to in a number of answers above.  It appears that CircuitLab recently (October 2016) became available in arduino.stackexchange.
To use it, click on the circuit icon next to the image icon in the editing tools bar (at top of edit box).
When you edit a question or answer containing a CircuitLab schematic, the schematic can be edited also.  The editor's components list contains numerous passive components, some generic transistors and op amps, and a few ICs (eg NE555).  Apparently, to draw an Arduino is a fairly lengthy process starting with a Custom box (from the Annotation section).  However, if one does get drawn and saved, it can be reused.  From the FAQ: “How can I save my custom part settings for re-use on another schematic?  ... you can copy and paste an item from one browser window to another and ... all of its parameters will be copied and pasted...”
CircuitLab documentation is available at circuitlab.com.  Note, the CircuitLab editor and simulator does not work in all browsers; see CircuitLab Documentation: System Requirements for more information.  Briefly:  “CircuitLab officially supports Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox”.  While Apple Safari and Opera are not officially supported, users report success.

simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab
Note, answers to “Embedding a schematic editor” on electronics.stackexchange meta include comments similar to above; replies from CircuitLab developers; and a couple of alternatives that now are moot.  Several non-embedded schematics programs are listed in  “Suggestions for a program for drawing simple schematics”.

Adding my vote for a schematic editor. The best way I have at the moment (even though I have Fritzing) is a pen, paper, and camera, as in this answer.

Poor mans Electronics CAD kit :)

Man's poor CAD, for sure.

That's more of a political correct naming ;D

I believe if we have a way to embed live circuits than we might have a better tool to explain things... It's not just a matter od schematics, but showing people the current flow usually maked their life a lot easier.
My votes goes to http://www.falstad.com/circuit, but I would love to see embeddable links

This is a somewhat difficult spot. For a site like Mathematics SE, it's a no-brainer that MathJax support should be enabled, because nearly all posts use and benefit from it. Similarly, we'd never consider adding a chess game replayer to Ask Ubuntu; it just doesn't make sense.
Here, the distinction isn't so clear. It's obvious how circuit diagrams are related to the topic of Arduino, but the list of posts that could benefit is pretty short as-is. And adding a package, even one that we already use on another site, isn't free; for example, see Nick Craver's (somewhat technical) explanation of testing MathJax on Stack Overflow. Granted, those are different dependencies on a different site, but the principle is the same.
The point of all this is, I haven't seen enough of a need for this tool demonstrated to justify enabling it. I realize the list is a bit old, and was probably forgotten about for a while, so I'm not formally declining the request just yet. If you're still interested in having a circuit diagrammer on Arduino, show me that it will benefit more than just a handful of posts!

I don't see how MathJax is a no brainer for Mathmathics, but a decent circuit editor isn't to Arduino. The list of posts that benefit is far from complete. I think there would've been a lot more quality answers on this stack if those tools would've been available. A lot knowledgeable people are dismissed because of the lack of basic tools required for them to share their knowledge. Anyways I left this stack ages ago, I don't mind.

Because many questions here (based on a quick, non-scientific sampling) seemed to be purely about code or other issues that don't involve circuit design/layout at all when I was writing the answer. I might be sympathetic to arguments like "more questions would have included diagrams had the tool been available, and it was too much of a pain to include them any other way" but nobody's made such an argument or shown any evidence of that.

Hardware information isn't optional for embedded systems. Without hardware information, many questions are left unanswerable. The four posts in list of posts that could benefit  show various uneven ways that more experienced users have worked around the lack of schematic capture (and all four of those questions successfully got answered). That's not a list of unanswered questions that needed hardware information to become answerable. Wish I could come up with a good SEDE query for this...

Unlike electronics.SE where about half of new questions are from experienced users, most Arduino.SE new questions are from "rep 1" users who mostly lack technical electronics background. On electronics.SE, new users are commonly prompted to "use CTRL+M to insert your schematic", but on Arduino.SE we're lucky if we eventually get a blurry cellphone photo of a breadboard, or a crummy fritzing build diagram. In some cases there's a reference to a specific "shield" make/model, and the hardware info must be searched offsite. This leads directly to poor quality questions...

Tag [tag:Arduino] is the single most popular tag on electronics.SE, but that community doesn't generally have the patience to interface with less experienced Arduino users or deal with the various quirks of the Arduino toolchain. Low quality Arduino questions frequently get migrated (dumped) into Arduino.SE, where the very tool needed to improve question quality is missing. Here there's a very small cadre of experienced users answering a wide range of posts from new users, and the lack of schematic editor hobbles the core users -- so the site struggles to graduate.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Is there an easy way to enter formulas in questions?
I know math is not everybody's favorite, but sometimes you just don't get away without when designing a circuit for Arduino. MathJax is enabled on EE.SE; can we have that here too?
There are not many questions on the Arduino stack yet, but I invite everybody to add example questions that benefit from a MathJax below.

Yes, the way to request support for MathJax (LaTeX support) is to demonstrate a need for this in actual practice. As you suggested, the best way to make this happen is by compiling a collection of posts below which would substantively be improved with the addition to MathJax. If the benefit to this site can be demonstrated in actual use, we will bring it up for consideration. Good luck!

@RobertCartaino How to prevent "Trivial answer converted to comment"?

Sorry about that. It's an automated system. Add a bit of supporting text do describe why you think the post you linked would benefit from MathJax.

For the time being I use http://www.math.ucla.edu/~robjohn/math/mathjax.html You can place a button on your bookmark toolbar to enable MathJax on any page.

Yes, a formula feature is needed. The Arduino has both hardware and software functions that are often best described as formula's when asking questions.

PID loop's
Filters

often filters need to be calculated for the Hardware and then worked with in hardware.
the PWM used with RC to make A2D can be best described with 2PiRC formula.

Polynomial
CRC's

example question

Motor control
etc...

Why do some pins have a different PWM frequency?
Above mentioned question will benefit from MathJax. The formula when written without proper formatting quickly gets hard to read.

Another perfect example why we want something trivial as the ability to author formulas is in this question:
Why voltage at AREF is given by Vin * R2 / Rtotal

Here is one.  I posted basically the same question on both Arduino SE and Electrical Engineering SE.
https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/307586/need-help-calibrating-adc-input-using-a-voltage-divider
How can I seriously calibrate ADC voltage readings with Arduino Nano?
The answer I came to in EE SE made good sense to share on Arduino.  I thought it was all one system but have discovered that each SE runs different software.
I havn't had time to remove the LaTex codes used to make it understandable on the SE one.  It looks really bad on Arduino.
The only option I have s to go back to the answer on Arduino and convert the equations to their FORTRAN equivalents.  Which I haven't yet done.
So I posted this question here:
As we get more advanced in our use of Arduinos in ever more complex ways, it would be good if the Arduino SE supported Tex
I sure hope it can happen sometimes soon.
Here is the list of SE that allows it:
Which Stack Exchange sites use MathJax?

With respect to the adage, "Go read the datasheet," datasheets contain formulae such as:

Figure 1 – Waveform frequency equation.

Figure 2 – PWM frequency equation.

Figure 3 – PWM resolution in bits equation.

Figure 4 – Maximum external clock frequency equation.

Figure 5 – Equations to calculate the ratio of the incoming data rate and internal receiver baud rate.

Figure 6 – ADC conversion result.

Since the Arduino datasheets contain formulae, the Arduino forums should as well.
And here is one of many posts that would benefit from MathJax formulae:
Switching a Solenoid Using Arduino's 5V Output?


text:
Why aren't we in public beta yet?
I thought the private beta was only supposed to last 7 days. We have been in for 9 days at the time of writing, and we are still in private beta. What are the condidions needed to reach public beta?

Sorry about that, folks! We normally do write a post when a private beta is being extended.
Arduino just needs some more time to come up with some additional questions, just to make certain there's plenty of interesting things for folks to do once the doors open. Nothing to be alarmed at, you're doing a great job - just need to build up the base a bit more.
Pops can chime in with any other guidance now that he's feeling better (which is probably what's to blame for you not getting a notice when we decided to extend the private beta).
Our bad.

We've actually been talking about this in chat. Apparently the private beta can last up to 2 weeks. If it's performing well, it is possible to go public after 1 week though, but it all depends on reviews by the SE Community Managers.
From what I've read of other betas, I get the impression we're doing fairly well. There may be some issues regarding our scope though, and the possibility of overlap with existing SE sites.

Arduino went into public beta a few hours ago!
Congrats, everyone!


text:
Using board names as tags
Given that the site's focus area is Arduino, creating tags such arduino-uno does not seem to me, as ideal. I think that just the board name without Arduino prefixed to it is sufficient, as the Arduino in the name is implicit.
So, should tags be of the form arduino-boardname or simply boardname? Eg, arduino-uno vs uno

Based on the answers given (Thanks @Butzke!), I felt it prudent to create a tag list of sorts for all the official boards. Feel free to add any missing board with the desirable tag name. If you disagree with any of the tag names, please mention so in a comment.

Uno - uno
Leonardo - leonardo
Due - due
Yún - yun
Tre - tre
Micro - arduino-micro
Robot - arduino-robot
Esplora - esplora
Mega - mega
Ethernet - arduino-ethernet
Mega 2560 - mega-2560
Mini - arduino-mini
Arduino Pro - arduino-pro

All variations of the board name will be synonimized eg. arduino-uno will map to uno. This list is for the tags that will be visible to users eg. uno, once the synonym is established.

Have all the Lilypads too.

Its missing the [tag:mini], [tag:nano], [tag:pro-mini], [tag:pro] and [tag:fio]

@Butzke Feel free to update it.

Readers should note that this is nothing more than AsheeshR's personal opinion - the fact that they accepted their own answer to their own question is not in any way a "decision" by the community of this site, and carries absolutely no weight.

I disagree removing the arduino before the name of the board.
Exist a lot of Arduinos that could make some troubles in tags, if we put just the name of the Arduino like:

Arduino Ethernet
Arduino Mini
Arduini Micro
Arduino Robot
Arduino Nano
Arduino Pro

Exist many possibilities to have a tag ethernet or robot that don't have anything to do with the Arduino Ethernet or with the Arduino Robot.
Even the Tags mini, micro and nano would be confusing just with this.
I think that putting the word arduino before the name of the board will be more organized.

Hmmm.  This is a very good point that I hadn't thought of...  +1

Since this was the highest-voted answer, I've implemented tag synonyms on this basis. Everything is now of the format like: [tag:arduino-uno] and [tag:arduino-mini] etc.

The tags should be named uno, mega, etc., so long as the board in question is an "official" board.  Using arduino-uno would be like a tag called math-arithmetic on Math.SE.
The arduino-boardname tags should be made synonyms, too, for the boardname, in any event.

I agree with Butzke that there can be confusion about whether or not the tag means the board. There are even three ethernet questions already. However, it is unlikely that uno will be mistaken for anything other than the Uno board. I propose that some boards, such as the Uno, Yún, Duemilanove, and Esplora should have not have arduino in the tag name (arduino-duemilanove can't even exist; it's five chars over the limit), but others, such as Ethernet, Micro, and Robot should.

arduino-due seems good enough, considering it's the way most people refer to it anyway.

@ScottM. There are still other names longer than 7 letters.


text:
Are questions about IDEs other than the official IDE on-topic?
IDE's such as Eclipse, Emacs and Vim can be used with extensions to program the board.

Are questions about installing IDEs being used to program the board on-topic?
Are questions about using IDEs that are being used to program the board on-topic?
Are questions about specific features of IDEs that are being used to program the board on-topic? Ex. code highlighting, code indentation, etc.
Are questions about uploading code through various IDEs on-topic?

For the purposes of this question, IDE refers to unofficial IDEs plus Arduino extension that may or may not be listed on Arduino.cc

My view on the four issues presented:

Installing IDEs should be off-topic unless the install process is substantially different when using the Arduino plugin.  (Example of exception: if you had to download Eclipse from an entirely different source, install it in some special way, etc., that would be fine here.)
If the question is about using the IDE itself, that should be off topic.  (e.g. "How do I create a project in Eclipse?"--no.  "How do I turn on/off Intellisense?"--no.)  If the question relates in a substantial way to using the Arduino extension to the IDE, that should be on-topic. (e.g. "How do I use the "--yes.)
No.  Specific features like code highlighting would be best asked on Stack Overflow, unless there is something very special about Arduino libraries that makes them hard to highlight, etc.
I would contend this should be "yes."  Uploading is something that wouldn't typically be built-in to the IDE (and would be introduced with the Arduino plugin), or it would be something platform dependent (e.g. uploading to an AVR chip is different than an Intel chip, etc.)

Agreed on all the above. IDEs are massively complicated, so we can't hope to answer all questions about them. Limiting our scope to stuff that's fairly unique for Arduino makes a lot of sense.

Are questions about installing IDEs being used to program the board on-topic?
No. But if an IDE has Arduino support maybe questions on how to set it up for arduino could be on topic.
Are questions about using IDEs that are being used to program the board on-topic?
Maybe. Again, if it's specific to doing something with Arduino it could be on topic.
Are questions about specific features of IDEs that are being used to program the board on-topic? Ex. code highlighting, code indentation, etc.
No. This deals with IDE features and has nothing to do with Arduino. The exception would be the official software provided by Arduino.
Are questions about uploading code through various IDEs on-topic?
Yes. It has to do with Arduino specifically.

Ask "What does this have to do with Arduino?" and if the answer to that question is not significant enough, then the question is probably off topic.

+1 because I 75% agree with you. Your third dot point This deals with IDE features and has nothing to do with Arduino, well, maybe it does. Ex, code highlighting and having Arduino code suitably highlighted would be on-topic IMHO


text:
How can we guarantee high quality in the questions and answers on our site?
One important aspect of every Stack Exchange site is guaranteeing that the questions and answers are high quality? How should we address quality in our site?

As I said in another answer, we should keep our scope broad and our minds open. But that doesn't mean we won't worry about quality. In summary, I think we should do appreciate questions that:

establishes a context (ie. why are you doing what you're doing)
has enough upfront research (the OP tried to solve the problem before coming to us)
shows us how the boards are connected (using schematics or those Arduino drawings linking pins with colored lines). We suggest that we aim at the same high standards as our Big Brother EE.SE site, as explained in those links:

Good tools for drawing schematics
Rules and guidelines for drawing good schematics

what else?

We should also try and educate instead of censoring. If someone asks a poor quality question, editors should educate these users on how to ask better questions. The editors should try and improve the questions instead of quickly close them. So, we should avoid closing questions as much as possible. We should only close questions that are hopeless.

Good suggestions. To help people out, I think it would probably be useful to have some kind of documentation on how to create and upload schematics or other drawings.

@PeterR.Bloomfield - That we already have - from our big brother EE site. See my updated anwser above.

For "what else," link to, in order of preference: 1) product pages that have links to schematics and data sheets, 2) directly to data sheets and schematics, and 3) product pages without such links.
I've written ten or so answers in the last couple of days, and more often than not I've had to track down product information myself and, all to frequently, hope that what I'd found was actually for the right product.


text:
What went wrong the last time, and how can we avoid the same mistakes?
This was the the closing announcement from the previous incarnation of Arduino:

The future of Arduino on Stack Exchange
After a week and a half in private beta, Arduino Stack Exchange has
  attracted some excellent questions, with great answers written by
  helpful, knowledgeable Arduino experts. Kudos!  What you're
  doing is great... But this isn't the right site for it, not right now.
  The volume
  of questions here is very low; more importantly, this is clearly
  becoming an Arduino-focused electronics site - and we already have an
  excellent site for electronics and
  electrical engineering professionals, students, and enthusiasts
  with a big
  focus on Arduino.  Therefore, we plan to close this
  site on April 25, 2013.  This is our
  screw-up, not yours. When we were debating whether to send this site
  into beta, I
  voiced some concern that there was a lot of overlap in the
  definition. After some debate internally, we decided to go ahead
  with the launch, thinking there would be enough interest in other
  Arduino topics to carry the site. We were wrong. However, I still
  think this site does demonstrate that there is a wealth of
  knowledge that hasn't necessarily found a place within EE.
Well... It should. There's no reason why y'all shouldn't
  be asking and answering the same good Arduino-specific questions on
  EE.SE that you've asked and answered here. Over the years, many
  different products and platforms have found homes within larger Stack
  Exchange sites by directing folks to a specific tag and just being
  active enough to guide them toward asking good, on-topic questions.
  Indeed, a fair number of Stack Exchange sites came into being after a
  thriving community developed on an existing site and then later broke
  off...  Some day, Arduino may follow this same path. Until
  then, I welcome you to help incubate the Arduino community on Stack
  Exchange by
  becoming an active member of Electrical Engineering. I've started
  a discussion on bolstering
  the Arduino community on EE.

The community needs to be on point this time around and focus on building a successful community. Moving forward out of private beta will not be a freebie for us.
What can we do differently this time to better our chances at a successful site?

We need to all post more questions.  Last time, we kinda "rushed" to get a whole bunch of people to sign up at the last minute (and pulled some funny stuff with the suggested question voting), so participation in Beta wasn't nearly what it could have been. (My $0.02)

Mods may want to migrate Arduino related questions from EE (where they were often derided, ridiculed, or discounted).

@Ron perhaps in the future Arduino questions that are closed as off-topic at EE can be migrated over here, but that's not an option for private beta. The site needs to prove itself on its own first

How many times do we have to run a beta arduino site before we get a pass? I agree wholeheartedly that all the previous questions that were migrated to EE should move back.  Take my points away from my EE profile if you want. I just want the SE experience without the intimidation of the EE area's community.  The types of questions asked on EE force the relatively beginner type of questions for the arduino answer-seeker to be overwhelmed or intimidated.  And while I'm glad there's an arduino subreddit, it's pretty lame for aggregating correct answers.

I think that more weight needs to be placed on the quality of the questions. There are already a number of questions where it isn't quite clear what is being asked. The onus needs to be on the person asking to provide enough detail and a clear enough question to get good answers. There seems to be a tendency on beta SEs to just answer poor questions anyway to gain rep, but in the long term, these questions do not contribute to the knowledge base.

@Cybergibbons Agreed. The key aspect however is that we can guide those users into asking better questions, rather than intimidating and alienating them. But that's something we have not being doing so far in our beta. We should put a stronger focus on quality of questions. Probably a good way to do it would be through coaching of the editors that we already have.

@cyber Use examples please. Quality is hard to discuss without specific cases to compare and evaluate.

Regarding posting more questions, yes that's important:  repeating my previous comment, when the Arduino Tre board comes out (linux + Arduino uController) there will be a lot more questions being asked, since the Arduino universe will expand in scope.  Perhaps a question of timing, if this beta lasts long enough so we can start seeing questions from the new board.

Our beta is still in its infacy, but I already see a very diferent set of questions and audience here, when compared to EE.SE.
I think that the vast majority of questions in our beta wouldn't be accepted in EE.SE as they are. They would have to be carefully reworded to make them fit into their scope, and even then, they would be quickly closed as off-topic, as it usually happens.
The main reason for classifying our questions as off-topic there is that most Arduino questions aren't about electronics design. Instead, being about a line of products, some Arduino questions tend to be classified as shopping questions or use of electronics devices.
Also, the minimum requirements for asking a question on EE.SE are really high. They expect that you know something about EE (ie. draw schematics) before they welcome you there. That counters the nature of Arduino users, who tend to be newbies, very inexperienced hackers (I include myself in that category). Other related reason may be differences in jargon (ie, saying sketch instead of firmware, shields instead of pluggable boards), and so on.
For those reasons, despite of having the tag with most users (arduino), EE.SE still alienates the majority of Arduino users out there. Many come in and ask one question and is quickly shown the exit door. There may be a ton of 1 rep users just like that. For that, and other reasons, EE.SE may be classified as a very marginal Arduino resource, at best. There are far better places on the Net to ask questions about Arduinos than in StackExchange, places where Arduino users are far better appreciated.
The Arduino community is large, but StackExchange still fails to tap into that resource. Having an Arduino site here at SE is, in my opinion, the proper way to get the attention of the 200k+ Arduino begginer hackers out there.
So, to answer your question, one thing we can do to make sure this instance of the Arduino.SE thrives is to keep our scope broad and accept everything about Arduinos, so that any Arduino user feel at home here.
Along the way, I think that we, as a community, can help at least some of those noobs graduate and become better Electrical Engineers and help them move on to ask and answer great questions at EE.SE as well. We can show them how to draw good schematics, design and etch their own boards, and so on. But in a much nicer and forgiving way.

I strongly agree. I think you've captured the essence of what Arduino.SE needs to be. Visitors here will often be people just tinkering for fun, so they'll be inexperienced and probably lacking confidence. Sites like EE and SO are much more geared towards professionals or very enthusiastic amateurs. In contrast, we perhaps need to be more down-to-earth, flexible, and encouraging if we want to make this site/community thrive in the long run.

This doesnt really answer the question what should we do differently given that the previous beta didn't work out.

@AsheeshR - That's a technicallity. What the OP probably wants to hear is what we can do to make our site a success this time around. Whether it's something we did wrong the other time and will do it differently now, or something we did right and will repeat now, it's irrelevant. I didn't participate on the other attempt, so how can I know what's been done?

Update the Help and 2 Minute Tour to clarify what Arduino.SE is about (and not about) compared to EE.SE.
Possible examples:

"Do ask about Sparkfun, Raspberry Pi, Lilypad, Adafruit, Beaglebone etc. projects that you're working on."
"Do ask about programming sketches with the Arduino IDE,  johnny-five, etc."
"Don't ask about soldering or [some other example which demonstrates the line between EE.SE and Arduino.SE]".

(Or, whatever's appropriate; because I'm brand new here I don't actually know what areas the community does/doesn't want to work on.) These examples should be informed by how the community feels about what's on/off topic, and will need to be updated as time goes by.


text:
Who will be the Moderator? What attributes should they have?
As you guys know, the Moderators are usually chosen at the end of the Private beta period. Seeing that we have minimum 5 days left, I think it is the perfect time to outline what we would like to see in a moderator. A moderator needs to be someone who not only knows arduino inside and out, but also can suggest creative criticism, and who is always can have a positive attitude.
But that isn't everything that would make the perfect moderator. I am wondering what qualities make the perfect moderator, be sure to include how important these attributes are!
For example:
Knows Arduino inside and out - Necessary

Temporary moderators are appointed at the end of the Private Beta.  These aren't permanent.  Anyway--I feel it's a little early for this question... it will be fairly obvious who is (and isn't) taking an active interest in the community (asking/answering questions), as well as its governance (meta participation).  Furthermore, moderators are, in general, supposed to be "invisible"--the community is supposed to decide what is on/off topic, the mods are there simply to make sure no one is being rude/inappropriate/getting out of hand.

@anorton I would argue that the diamond should be invisible, not necessarily the user who holds it. Also, in the initial stages, moderators have to be heavily involved as there are not enough users at the needed reputation levels to carry out all the moderation activities needed.

@AsheeshR eh... maybe "invisible" didn't convey the term I meant.  My point is that Moderators shouldn't take on a "one man army" approach to keeping the site in check--they need to ensure that they are acting as representatives of the community, rather than a ruling class.  But, that's material for a different thread, methinks.

Thanks for all the feedback

Actually, knowing Arduino too well is far from  necessary. They should be knowledgeable, yes, but anything more is just a bonus for the community and their efforts should be focussed as such ;-)
What is needed in a community moderator is the ability to communicate clearly and effectively, as well as have the patience to handle all types of members of the community respectfully. Also, to function impartially even when faced with difficult situations such as that may happen involving respected members, arguments, flame wars, etc.
Community moderators aren't referred to as janitors for nothing. There is a fair bit of work to be done behind the scenes, a lot of which may be fairly involved and taxing. The only reward for this effort is seeing the site grow and move towards graduation (which can be rather satisfying :) )
The only thing necessary is that the individual should be active and involved in the community through content generation, meta participation, chat availability, editing, reviewing and voting (close/reopen). Also, in general the individual should be helpful and guide new members of the community wherever needed.
Evangelising the community and being a good representative of Arduino.SE wherever the situation may so demand would be great too!

TL;DR Moderators should know Arduino.SE and we should know them; nothing else is needed.

+1 you do look like a good candidate to me.


text:
Are "code review" style questions allowed?
The beta Code Review stack exchange is doing rather well, with a lot of visitors and questions. It's an in-demand service:
http://codereview.stackexchange.com
Are "code review" style questions allowed here?

Yes, I think they should be allowed if the code relies on some Arduino-specific stuff, such as function calls or something related to hardware behaviour etc. The reason is that those elements may not be familiar or useful to non-Arduino programmers, so the question/answers won't have much value on the generic code review site.

I agree. Code can utilise platform specific features, which is pretty much our scope, and may not be of interest to people outside of this domain.


text:
Should we add some content on our site that is widely known to get more users on our site?
(Obviously, we shouldn't be focusing solely on getting users in a private beta, but I want to add some content to the site and the current content is limited.
Let me give an example. Can I do a "Q & A style" of what are the curved lines by some of the pin numbers? or should I not post anything like that. Here's some obvious pros/cons:
Pros:

Can help get new users if they are searching this question. If we grow enough to be 90% of the time in the top 3 listings on Google, we might gain a large chunk of new users that way
If done correctly, it can add an example of well content to our site
We can gain reputation!!! (Just kidding about that last one...)
Help with question count to try to improve the odds of this beta surviving and give it a "jump start"

Cons:

Wastes server resources
Some users who don't know it's a Q & A post might downvote it because the OP didn't "put much effort into it" by not Googling it.

The very motivation behind me participating on Stack Exchange sites is that we share and, in many instances, generate knowledge, that is usually hard to find and/or not widely available or known.
Simply duplicating content that can be found in lots of other reputable sites is in my belief, not what we are here to do, and we should refrain from doing so.
However, if we have information to add to such widely available content, then yes, it is worth posting on this site.

I see nothing wrong with this, and in fact, encourage it to some extent. I've done a couple of question/answers myself.
I come mainly from SO so my opinion is based on that. Google any programming question, no matter how simple or basic it is, and you'll find a stack overflow result on the first page.
Arduino.SE can be the one-stop for people's Arduino questions. Is that not the goal of this site? Sure the answers are out there, but most of the questions on this site (and many on SO) are out there on Google, too. But the point of SE is to have them all in one place.
So that's a fine question if you ask me. Sure it'll be in the Arduino docs, but you won't be able to ask Google "what are the curved lines by some of the pin numbers [on Arduino]?" and find the answer. You could if it was on Arduino.SE.
Also: all the pros clearly outweigh the cons in your list.


text:
What do you do with ignoramuses?
What are you supposed to do with the ignoramuses that ask a patently idiotic question and then refuse point blank to believe any of the answers because they have formed their own (completely erroneous) opinion? All the sites seem to suffer from them, but I haven't yet found a suitable solution short of closing the question "because you are an idiot" (well, not those exact words, but that kind of sentiment).
I see them all the time across the network - from people thinking you can make a yellow spot of light float in mid-air by crossing a red and green laser beam (duh...!) to this most recent one where the OP is convinced that because you can make a simple tuned circuit for low frequencies on a breadboard it would be simple and cheap to create a similar circuit for receiving the complex packets transmitted by a 2.4GHz nRF24L01 (in that case it got closed as off topic, thankfully. They don't always). Even though he has been told by numerous people that no, it can't be done by a mere mortal (certainly not by someone that would ask such a question and most definitely not below the cost of an nRF24L01), and shown alternative communications systems that would better fit his requirements, he still refuses to believe us.
And yes, this is (to a certain extent) a rant. It's also an opening for discussion on how we can best deal with these kind of people.
They seem to lack a basic understanding of the simplest underlying principles of physics and are completely close minded to any new information or teaching that doesn't fit into their small distorted little world.

Not every question is a good one, that's for sure. Plus you get ones that request an answer "within two hours" (assignment due, clearly).
You have options:

Vote the question down (which you can do without penalty)
Vote to close (eg. as too broad). The one about the 2.4 GHz was really about electronics, not Arduino, so you could also vote to close as off-topic.
Comment, seeking clarification.
Comment, pointing out they should try something simpler first

Finally:

Ignore them. The question (especially with low votes) will disappear down into the unanswered pile.

It's probably preferable to also vote down or vote-to-close before ignoring them, otherwise SE thinks it is a good question which no-one could answer, which counts against our percentage of questions answered figure. (Currently 75%).

I saw that one :) I think the best thing to do is pretty much to close the question, and if he asks a similar question AGAIN (because his previous question about the topic has been closed) to just close that one too.
An other way is to implement the "penalty box" system from Stack Overflow. Maybe for user above 2.5k rep?


text:
Is it OK to ask questions about "Arduino compatible" micros (not clones)?
There are many Arduino compatible micros and derivatives. I'm thinking specifically here of the Spark Core.
It's not a clone, but uses the Arduino Sketch language and is wi-fi IoT oriented.
Are question related to Arduino compatible devices applicable here?

possible duplicate of Are clone-specific questions on topic for this site?

@sachleen I tried to make it clear in the question that this is not about Clones. But perhaps that was misunderstood. Arduino compatible or derivative devices are NOT clones and generally provide another level of functionality that Arduino official boards don't have.

OK I'm already confused, is there an official distinction between compatible vs. clone anywhere, or should I ask that as a question?

@ChrisO Here's clarification from Massimo Banzi in Arduino blog: http://blog.arduino.cc/2013/07/10/send-in-the-clones/#.Uw29BhDYPxw

@akellyirl Thanks that answers my question.

Arduino Compatible == Clone. I don't really know where you're going with this....

@AnnonomusPerson (Arduino Compatibles, Derivatives) != Clones... Derivatives extend the functionality of Arduino in a meaningful way. Quoting from Massimo Banzi's Blog (ref: above) "Derivatives. These are products that are derived from the Arduino hardware design but they innovate either by providing a different layout and features often to better serve a specific market. These are the products that have also helped Arduino become so ubiquitous." Yes, Compatibles are more "Hazy" territory but usually they also extend Arduino functionality in some way.

My personal opinion is that the site should include within its scope all questions about:

The official boards
Questions about the official IDE
The range of shields available
Clones compatible with the IDE or the shields
Devices/chips that are mentioned as being accessories for Arduino

So, yes.

The thing about compatible devices is that whilst they are compatible in some way such as using the Sketch commands and providing Analogue and Digital I/Os, they don't necessarily meet the criteria you laid out. Nevertheless Arduino Sketches can port to these devices and they can provide additional benefits to an Arduino user and therefore may complement an Arduino user's toolkit of devices. Possible question for "compatibles" may be: library porting; equivalent capability etc...

I would include more IDEs to be in-topic, such as the Eclipse and Visual Studion Arduino plugins, WinAVR etc. What do you think?

@Ricardo I would consider such questions to be borderline. For example, my question on using RStudio with Arduino is considered off-topic. I think this deserves its own discussion.

What about Bareduinos (ATMEGA chip on a breadboard), only with the IDE or programing it?

@AnnonomusPerson Are you the user who participated last time as well? Nice to see you here :) Bareduino questions would depend on the specific instance. Its hard to say without an example to gauge the type of questions to be expected. Although, if the question seems too EE specific, then EE.SE would be a better home.

@AsheeshR Yeah I didn't know that they did a second beta however I didn't sign up so I think I accidentally used a bug to sign up! Haha :) I hope this one doesn't go to waste either. I'm hoping for Moderator, or at least temporary but I think I'm too late. Oh well! It does take a ton of time.

@AnnonomusPerson If you signed through the site link on the A51 page, then thats not a bug :) This beta seems to be quite different from last time. The questions are far more diverse. Anyways, I hope the same as well.

@AsheeshR But the question count is too low it seems like. 10ish per day... yikes. Working on that now. It is only private now but still... that's what really killed us last time

Yes. Arduino has encouraged derivative hardware from the start. In the introduction on the official site they say:

All Arduino boards are completely open-source, empowering users to build them independently and eventually adapt them to their particular needs.

(The above is taken from this answer.)


text:
2017 Moderator Election Q&A - Question Collection
Arduino Stack Exchange is scheduled for an election next week, August 14th.In connection with that, we will be holding a Q&A with the candidates.  This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic of moderation.  Participation is completely voluntary.

The purpose of this thread was to collect questions for the questionnaire. The questionnaire is now live, and you may find it here.

Here's how it'll work:

Until the nomination phase, (so, until Monday, August 14th at 20:00:00Z UTC, or 4:00 pm EDT on the same day, give or take time to arrive for closure), this question will be open to collect potential questions from the users of the site. Post answers to this question containing any questions you would like to ask the candidates. Please only post one question per answer.
We, the Community Team, will be providing a small selection of generic questions. The first two will be guaranteed to be included, the latter ones are if the community doesn't supply enough questions. This will be done in a single post, unlike the prior instruction.
If your question contains a link, please use the syntax of [text](link), as that will make it easier for transcribing for the finished questionnaire.
This is a perfect opportunity to voice questions that are specific to your community and issues that you are running into at currently.
At the start of the nomination phase, the Community Team will select up to 8 of the top voted questions submitted by the community provided in this thread, to use in addition to the aforementioned 2 guaranteed questions.
Once questions have been selected, a new question will be opened to host the actual questionnaire for the candidates, typically containing 10 questions in total.
This is not the only option that users have for gathering information on candidates. As a community, you are still free to, for example, hold a live chat session with your candidates to ask further questions, or perhaps clarifications from what is provided in the Q&A.

If you have any questions or feedback about this process, feel free to post as a comment here.

A question is flagged as "off-topic" because it only peripherally involves an Arduino. For example "How do I get my Arduino to turn on a motor using a transistor?". Should it be closed altogether, migrated to Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange (where they are used to questions about transistors), or left here as a good beginner's Arduino question? Alternatively would you dismiss the flag and let the community handle the question via down-votes or vote-to-close?

A question is flagged as "not an answer" because it basically only has a link in it. The question is "Where can I find the datasheet for the Atmega328P" and the answer is a link to the datasheet. There is a school of thought that link only answers are not good answers. However in this case there isn't really any other way of answering the question. Copying and pasting a huge datasheet into the answer isn't really an option. Also see Should I flag answers which contain only a link as “not an answer”?. As a moderator, would you delete the answer, or let it stand?

A question has a lengthy number of comments under it suggesting various possible solutions to the asked problem. Once the number of comments reaches 20 the system (Community) automatically flags it suggesting that the comments be moved to chat. You move the comments to chat as suggested, and then get a complaint from a user that "valuable information is now hidden away in chat rather than under the question where it should be". How do you respond?

Here is a set of general questions, gathered as very common questions asked every election. As mentioned in the instructions, the first two questions are guaranteed to show up in the Q&A, while the others are if there aren't enough questions (or, if you like one enough, you may split it off as a separate answer for review within the community's 8).

How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?
How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?

In your opinion, what do moderators do?
A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?
In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?

What would you do if two users start insulting each other about not having sufficient knowledge to post on this site? Assume that both users have flagged each other's comments as rude or abusive.


text:
2019: a year in moderation
It's New Year's Day in Stack Exchange land...
A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:

We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.
  -- A Theory of Moderation

While there certainly are Moderators here, a significant amount of the moderation is done by ordinary people, using the privileges
they've earned by virtue of their contributions to the site. Each of you contributes a little bit of time and effort, and together you accomplish much.
As we enter a new year, let's pause and reflect, taking a moment to appreciate the work that we do here together.
And what could be more festive than a big pile of numbers?
So here is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Arduino over the past 12 months:
                 Action                  Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended²                                  1          6
Users destroyed³                                 15          0
Users deleted                                     4          0
Users contacted                                   6          0
Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue           266      1,214
Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue               50        311
Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue         90        754
Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue               72        596
Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue             1,174      2,451
Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue              290      3,493
Questions unprotected                             3          0
Questions reopened                               24          5
Questions protected                             141         26
Questions migrated                               36          0
Questions flagged⁵                                0        858
Questions closed                                720        668
Question flags handled⁵                         158        700
Posts unlocked                                    2          6
Posts undeleted                                   5         56
Posts locked                                      5        155
Posts deleted⁶                                  598      2,586
Posts bumped                                      0      2,191
Comments undeleted                                3          0
Comments flagged                                  0        643
Comments deleted⁷                               791      2,679
Comment flags handled                           106        537
Answers flagged                                   1      1,346
Answer flags handled                          1,200        147
All comments on a post moved to chat             36          0

Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Arduino without diamonds next to their names, and to the automated systems otherwise known as user #-1.
² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.
³ A "destroyed" user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.
⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.
⁵ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes).
⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.
⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).
Further reading:

Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? I posted a similar report here last year: 2018: a year in moderation...
You can also check out this report on other sites
Or peruse detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites

Wishing you all a happy new year...

thank you. could the user#-1 have a separate column?


text:
How do we get syntax highlighting?
I was adding some code to a question, and noticed that I couldn't get syntax highlighting to work. I added a language hint as is used on Stack Overflow, but it had no effect.
I appreciate that most SE sites won't need syntax highlighting (which is presumably why it's not enabled by default), but obviously it could be very useful for us. Is that something which will be sorted out if/when we graduate to 'proper' SE status, or can we realistically do something about it just now?

http://meta.electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/340/syntax-highlighting-should-be-supported-on-electrical-engineering-like-on-so

Would also be nice to have formula as well.

@Cybergibbons See http://meta.arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/13/is-there-an-easy-way-to-enter-formulas-in-questions

I see that sytnax highlighting appears to have been updated and lost the hint of "" . I looked back and confirmed that it did used to work in cases where the snibit of code was not auto detected, nor by the tag. It might be advantageous to have it as default.

This is enabled, and on by default in the programming tag.
You can use language hints to fine-tune the highlighting if the defaults aren't acceptable.

Thanks Shog. I wonder if it ought to be extended to all questions though? I suspect there will be several instances where we need to include code of some kind, even when the question isn't directly about programming.

As I said, you can use the language hints for more precise control of this - including enabling highlighting in posts where it wouldn't otherwise occur. A moderator here (once you have them) can set defaults on other tags if need-be.

What about Arduino specific support? Arduino is in itself a language, of sorts.

We use Prettify for highlighting. If it ain't supported by Prettify, it ain't supported here.

@Shog9 Why isn't the highlighting working here: http://arduino.stackexchange.com/q/692/275 I edited in the language hint plus added the programming tag.

Looks fine to me, @Philip

@Shog9 True, now it does. Although I am not sure whether it's thanks to the programming tag or the language hint. Could it be, that as long as an edit is under review, even I cannot see the syntax highlighting?

@Shog9 Simply adding the language hint doesn't seem to work as proven here: http://arduino.stackexchange.com/q/699/275

Needs to be on its own line, not abutting the previous paragraph, @Philip.

@Shog9 Ah, thanks. Good to know. Perhaps a respective note should be added to the language hints markdown page.

Very interesting approach, but often code is included but is not the core of the question so the OP might not think to use that tag.   Also, how many more tags trigger special operations here?  Can we add a LaTex tag to allow us to describe things mathematically?

Not sure what you're asking in the first part of your comment, @SDsolar. As for LaTeX, yes that can be enabled here if it would be routinely useful; you can post a separate request with examples of posts where such formulas would be beneficial.

Simply edit the question to add the following text before the code:
<!-- language-all: c++ -->

Note: This should not be indented by the 4 spaces and should have a carriage return before and after.
This also works:
<!-- language-all: lang-cpp -->

Stack Exchange uses Google Prettify for all of the syntax highlighting.
Markdown Editor Help

Code blocks can be highlighted using Google Prettify. In many cases, the syntax highlighting language will be inferred from the question's tags.

And I suppose people are expected to be born with this knowledge?

@SDsolar I agree. That is why I have put this answer here, so people can find it here and add it to their post/edit.

It is documented on the Markdown Editor Help page (https://arduino.stackexchange.com/editing-help#syntax-highlighting). I have added this to my answer.

TNX, @sa_leinad.  The fact that I found here it is proof that your method worked.  Have a great day.


text:
CircuitLab Broken?
I mean, it's slow at inserting a schematic at the best of times - but for me the schematic editor just won't work today. It just sits there spinning its wheels when you try to insert the schematic into a question or answer.
Is anyone else able to insert a schematic today, or is it just me?

Looks like it's working now :)

Indeed. I just used it.

Based on the network logs in KingDuken's answer over on EE, it appears that CircuitLab's server was having some issues and providing a response that the front-end didn't know how to handle.
It appears to be working now. Hopefully it stays that way...

It's broken for me. I did get a "Your browser is not officially supported..." message before I could use CircuitLab to draw a circuit. Clicking the button to insert it into the answer just turned the "spinning wait graphic" on.

I don't get a message - just the spinner.


text:
Do we want hats (WinterBash 2015)?
Winter Bash (2014 (promotion page), 2013 (blog post)) is a fun Stack Exchange tradition to celebrate the holidays. Simply put, it's allows users to get "hats" that you can put on your avatar and that are displayed across the network on participating sites.
Speaking of participating sites, Stack Exchange allows each community to opt out as a whole if they have reasons to do so, such as appearing more professional without hats. If you're not a hatter (you're a hater of hats!), you can manually opt out of seeing hats on all Stack Exchange sites.
This event will run from December 14th, 2015 to January 3rd, 2016.
So let's hatve at it! Do we want hats?

Yes we loved to do!
But, as you know, these hats are static. My opinion is that let's wear well-designed dinamically gif pictures to get these gifts. Not static jpegs, just make these hats can be able to rotate, dance, shining, and/or shaking e.t.c. according to the forums.
For example, if I am in Stack overflow, I want my hat is flowing. And, if I am in Arduino Forum, I want my hat to blink itself with red, white, yellow colors.
These are my opinions to improve your question.


text:
Project Showcase '14 is coming to Arduino Stack Exchange! (Updated 3/19/14)

Its been a month since launch and we have had a fair bit of Q&A. We have solved a fair number of problems, and now, its time to see where that has gotten you and us!
To celebrate 10 years of Arduino, we are proud to announce the first event ever on Arduino Stack Exchange.

The logo is a derivative of the Arduino Community Logo licensed under Creative Commons license CC-SA-BY-NC 3.0

Get your boards and soldering equipment out, dig out the ICs and resistors. The first Arduino Stack Exchange contest is just round the corner. We will be looking for interesting projects that are built using Arduinos. The contest is aimed towards sharing, discussing and providing feedback on projects that you and other members are working on.
There may be a surprise in store as well for the best* submission.
To make it a huge success, we need your help! Spread the word, tell your friends and colleagues. The more people that participate, the more fun its going to be!
Keep an eye on this post. More details coming soon.
Details:

The prize is an official Stack Exchange t-shirt (Provided by Pops)
Limit two entries per person. If more than two are provided, only the first two will be considered.
Clones are allowed.
Projects for consideration will be accepted through March 29th, 2014 at 4:00 UTC. The question will still remain open in case someone wants to show off their project they made on Arduino Day 2014.

The rest of the details will be posted on the 23rd in a post on main.

This is being organized by Peter R Bloomfield, Annonomous Person, Sachleen and AsheeshR.
*The winner will be decided at the discretion of the event organizers. The event organizers (obviously) cannot win.
The logo is a derivative of the Arduino Community Logo licensed under Creative Commons license CC-SA-BY-NC 3.0

Does the project have to be something we build from scratch starting on the 23rd?

@TheGuy Nope. You can build it whenever, just submissions are open on the 23rd.

The contest post and updated meta post are now up.


text:
3-vote close - how's it going?
UPDATE: While the testing period has ended, this change has been well-received by the community so we have opted to not reset the votes needed to close/reopen to 5 while we look at data.
Please let me know if you have any concerns about this change in the planned process or if you feel the number of votes should be changed back at least temporarily. I'll be back in a few weeks with the results of the project.

Part of understanding the impact of three-vote closure is to understand what impact it's having on y'all. I'd like to ask anyone who feels up to it to write an answer to this question and to tell us about your experience over the past few weeks.
The sorts of things I'm interested in knowing (feel free to address all or none or add your own) -

Did this help?
Did it hurt?
Did it make you more interested in close/reopen reviewing? Less?

Are there things other than 3-vote close impacting your interest in reviewing?

If you can't vote but do flag, did this make you more/less likely to flag?
Would you prefer to go back to 5?
Should it be permanent?
What would you like me to look into when it comes to analyzing the data from the test?
Were there any side-effects (good or bad) that you want me to be aware of?

These are merely prompts, so feel free to add anything I'm missing that you think is worth saying. This is focused on how you're feeling about it and what data you want me to look at, so don't feel like you need to analyze the data over the last 30 days - though you're welcome to if that's how you figure out what you feel.
If you have any outstanding questions, also feel welcome to ask them here.
The test will run until about Monday the 21st of June, at which point we'll be resetting the votes to close up to 5 while I review the responses here and dig into the data that we've been collecting.

Hi Catija, could SE.3D Printing be considered for a three vote limit, when/if it is introduced?  We have had an unofficial vote on it, and most voters are in favour of the three vote limit (5-1 in favour). Please see Does this 3D Printing site want only three votes to close (or should we stick with five)?. Thanks.

@Greenonline I've just added the status-review tag - as a note, any time there's a request y'all want to bring to our attention that needs staff review (whether that's a feature request or a bug report, ect) add the status-review tag to it and we'll try to get back to you.

I think it's been positive. With the lower numbers this site has often seen questions sitting on 3 or 4 close votes and hanging there (until we mods closed them). Now we're seeing things naturally close more often, which is good.

Would you prefer to go back to 5?

no

Should it be permanent?

yes

Did it make you more interested in close/reopen reviewing?

yes
Thank you

Fast-forward to 2024 and I'm not so happy about only needing 3 votes to close a question. We are seeing multiple instances of questions being closed, very quickly, before the OP has had a chance to address issues raised in the comments about problematic parts of their question (such as lack of detail, poorly formatted code, and so on).
This has happened to me on other parts of the Stack Exchange network. I've posted a carefully-crafted question (bearing in mind I am a moderator, which means I understand what questions should look like). I've put a lot of work into making it a good question, and then, before anyone (who actually might be able to help) has had a chance to answer it, it is closed a couple of hours later by the "question police".
This sort of non-welcoming behaviour, especially to new posters, is likely to mean they take their questions somewhere else, for example <horror> ChatGPT.
And then they may not necessarily get an optimal experience either. By which I mean, ChatGPT can give good answers, but it can also talk Complete Nonsense.


text:
6 downvotes in 6 days - what am I doing wrong?
I've recently joined Arduino.SE but am a 7K+ reputation member of both SO and U&L.
Every community has its different mores, and I'm guessing that I've not yet grokked this one's.
My reputation page shows -12 reputation over the last 6 days on both questions and answers.
Can someone explain what I may be missing? Or have I just had a bad run of luck?

I have the same going on (with 11 downvotes), see https://arduino.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2665/11-downvotes-in-a-few-weeks-what-am-i-doing-wrong    .... I think someone is picking on you.

Bad luck, mainly.  Answers that don't quite pertain to the question, questions that you answer yourself where the question has been asked before, or questions that aren't on topic (note: we have questions on Arduino hardware and other systems that use the Arduino API. Generic microcontroller hardware questions, even if they are for a microcontroller that happens to be used on an Arduino, are not really our sphere).
We are a fairly narrow site. For more general questions on electronics and microcontrollers the Electrical Engineering SE is usually a better fit.

Hmm, the thing is that I never asked a "generic microcontroller question". All the questions / answers pertained to Leonardo's chip.

Could you elaborate on the answer(s) which don't quite pertain to the question?

There is one where the OP asks where on his hard drive some files are. You point him to Github. While the files are available there, that's not what the OP asked. Maybe he wants to modify the files on his hard drive or something. So people see that answer as wrong, since it's not answering the question asked.

As for the chip one, you're asking about the chip and the datasheet. That's more generic than about the Leonardo. That's microcontroller. That's EE, not Arduino. If the question had been about the Leonardo as a whole then that's fine. Personally I have nothing against that kind of question.

However, the simple answer to any question like that (which is probably why it got closed / downvoted) is "From the manufacturer of the chip".

The datasheet also describes registers which (correct me if I'm wrong) would fall under Arduino.  I'm glad to learn the manufacturer is now Microchip, which was non-obvious given how generic the result is when googling ATmega.

This site doesn't tend to up or down-vote much which therefore skews the votes you do get. As an example, I got 77 votes for an answer on Cooking Stack Exchange where I basically posted a photo of a kitchen strainer which took me a couple of minutes to take. On the other hand, I've spent hours on posts which only got a handful of votes. For example this one about interrupts which only got 11 upvotes (maybe I didn't spend hours on that particular one, but I still get a very low upvote rate).
I had down-votes when I initially joined this site, and now I am a moderator. I suggest you ignore the implied criticism and just do your best to post interesting questions, and also interesting answers and let your work speak for itself.
To a certain extent people will downvote a question if it looks like you haven't tried all that hard to research before posting, or if there is a similar question already with an answer. I'm not saying this applies in your case, but that tends to be what happens.

Thanks Nick. I purposefully risk some down votes out of laziness sometimes, eg answering with a GitHub link when someone asks for where they can find some code on their HDD, rather than writing a separate question and answer for X in what may be an XY problem.

@TomHale, add the link as comment, not an answer

@Juraj Yes, but you aren't supposed to "answer" in comments, even with a link. The correct approach is to make a proper answer that stands on its own. Links can go down, so putting a link in an answer, or a comment, doesn't really help if that happens.

11 upvotes that's 15 now, does your meta post now qualify as click bait?