How to Introduce Electronics to Software Developers

Question

I've seen many new users declarating that they come from programming or something else, but without any experience, and wanting to build lunar modules, supercomputers and so on.

I attribute the cause of this in part to Arduino et similia, because they are very simple and allow to make many funny things, even if you are a newbie. But it's just an hypothesis, there may be many different causes.

So my question is: there is something that we can do in this site to give a global answer to all these questions, and suggesting a starting point for getting into electronics?

This is an example: every time I see a question by someone who seems lacking the base concepts of electronics, I go to the profile and see that he's a quite experienced user of Stack Overflow, meaning that he's a programmer.

UPDATE: And would we talk about this? A web developer who wants to create a capacitive touch screen in thin film; now, I don't want to seem to critic, but why everybody think that electronics is like Lego?

Answer 1

Every time I try to answer a question like the one you linked, I find myself having a very hard time because I feel like I have to step back to the basics in order to find the misunderstanding they have. The problem is identifying what part of the problem the poster has misunderstood. I don't think any of the answers or comments are even doing a good job at doing so. Anyone who has issues with those basics also probably don't understand what is meant by output impedance nor do I think he is talking about a constant current source.

The root of the problem that I see is that the poster has not described what it is that they are trying to do. Once this context is in place it is much easier to answer their question in a way that is helpful to them.

Once the post has given context to their question then it can be determined if it is a duplicate of a previous question, or if we should go ahead and spend the time to write a new answer explaining the concepts to them.

The problem with a global answer is that it is hard to guess what it is people will need help with, so there is no way to have a resource that covers everything they need to know. As we build up a larger amount of basic questions/answers then we can just start pointing people to those questions.