Working on a new Learning website.


Jack Gassett

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Hey everyone, inspired by the great learning websites at learn.adafruit.com and learn.sparkfun.com we started work on our own learning website at learn.gadgetfactory.net.

 

Dhia has been hard at work getting everything ready for a general release, we are not quite ready yet but I wanted to put a link out there so people could look at what we have and give us any feedback.

 

The goal is to make an easy to use tutorial system that allows us and anyone who has knowledge to share to write tutorials without all the fuss involved with using a wiki. It gets tedious and time consuming to write tutorials in the wiki but with wordpress there are tons of plugins that make writing content much easier.

 

Let us know what you think!

Jack.

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Looking much better now that the content is fleshed out! Do you have any specific views on what you want editorially? 

 

Learn@sparkfun is highly structured in its content, trying to introduce skills/techniques one at a time. A bit like chapters of an introduction to hobby electronics book.

 

Adafruit is very much a "show and tell" of projects, sometimes with a little focus on a given technique. A bit like an electronics magazine.

 

Sometime in the future I have to re-write my eBook to include all the things I've learnt (like how to correctly use signed/unsigned, type conversions, and so on), and maybe update it to Spartan 6, since that is rapidly becoming the baseline for an intro board. Do you think I should think about putting in Learn@sparkfun rather than ASCIIDOC (I might look at doing both).

 

What do you think the editorial process will be? People write submissions, GF staff then edit them and post them?

 

Do you have a hit-list of topics you want to have covered? 

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Hi Jack,

 

Congratulation for nice job and thanks to Dhia for efforts.

 

Will for sure use these ressources.

I'm slowly understand how this works.

My goal is to implement the Frequency generator from XILINX (on the Spartan3 board) on PP. Seems a good exercice with a lot of interface.

Your learning site will help me with ZP and the like.

 

Have a very nice day.

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Looking much better now that the content is fleshed out! Do you have any specific views on what you want editorially? 

 

Learn@sparkfun is highly structured in its content, trying to introduce skills/techniques one at a time. A bit like chapters of an introduction to hobby electronics book.

 

Adafruit is very much a "show and tell" of projects, sometimes with a little focus on a given technique. A bit like an electronics magazine.

 

Sometime in the future I have to re-write my eBook to include all the things I've learnt (like how to correctly use signed/unsigned, type conversions, and so on), and maybe update it to Spartan 6, since that is rapidly becoming the baseline for an intro board. Do you think I should think about putting in Learn@sparkfun rather than ASCIIDOC (I might look at doing both).

 

What do you think the editorial process will be? People write submissions, GF staff then edit them and post them?

 

Do you have a hit-list of topics you want to have covered? 

My goal with the learn website was to make it so anyone can come in as a contributor and not have to worry about learning the Wiki format to contribute. I'm also personally tired of all the extra effort that goes into getting the formatting of a wiki page just right. I want to just drag and drop, and make new tutorials like I would be doing in a Word doc instead of a Wiki. The truth though is that we still have more work to do on the back end before that is a reality. I wrote one article, the Papilio Loader on Linux tutorial and it was more of a nightmare then writing on the Wiki was. [i just re-read this section and realized it is gibberish!] My idea is to apply the same css formatting to the back end editor as is applied to the website's theme so what you are inputting into the editor looks exactly like it will when the article is published. Then I want to add custom styles so you can highlight a block of text and just apply a style to turn it into an important info callout box. Or make a generic table then highlight it and select a custom table style that will show up in the editor AND the published article looking exactly the same. [/gibbersh] So it is a little more work we have to do yet, but once that is done and it is not such a hassle to write articles I want to open it up to anyone who is interested in sharing with the community.

 

Honestly, I go back and forth with whether it is better to write the next series of documentation I have in mind in Asciidoc or on the learning website. I want to release the schematic entry libraries and then either expand your ebook or make a series of learn articles that step people through how to use them. The eBook format is great for related articles such as this, but we also need a place where we can write tutorials about the pcDuino, or the Arduino, or even just simple things like how to generate a DCM or a memory block.

 

So I guess where I stand now is that the learn website is for quick tutorials and more in depth stuff might make more sense as an eBook. But, another reality is that I sometimes find it hard to get started with an ebook because it is a large undertaking and I'm afraid I'm going to run out of time halfway through and never finish it. If I take the approach of writing a bunch of small articles I'm much more likely to get started and come back to it later...

 

Hi Jack,

 

Congratulation for nice job and thanks to Dhia for efforts.

 

Will for sure use these ressources.

I'm slowly understand how this works.

My goal is to implement the Frequency generator from XILINX (on the Spartan3 board) on PP. Seems a good exercice with a lot of interface.

Your learning site will help me with ZP and the like.

 

Have a very nice day.

 

Thank you, I will think about ways to write some tutorials that will help in this process. I think the one you are most in need of is how to make a wishbone core...

 

Jack.

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