What you are saying is that if a school teacher prepares projects for the students, then it is only proper that he/she also hands out solution examples to make sure that all students will manage to get a working solution in time? But aren't a school teacher instead expected to prepare projects that the students are expected to manage as long as they are following the lessons and are doing the homework?

You think it is more important that a student gets handed a solution than that they understand the solution? Is that representative to your way through school too?


Raising someones mental level can probably not be done at all. The mental level is something we are born with, but we can ourselves decide to reduce that level by abusing our bodies with drugs, lack of sleep etc.

But I do consider it important to adjust the level of help depending on the knowledge of the requester. The speed to progress is something else. If the requester gets stuck, I can help with alternative wordings to describe a solution. But I can't jump ahead and describe finesses of a commercial grade product with someone unless they have all background knowledge in the field to understand what I'm saying. If you have been sick in school and missed a whole year, the teachers can't just push you into second grade and expect you to manage the math or chemistry just like that.

Learning how a shift register works, how to decide what resistor to use for a specific supply voltage and LED, how to send out a precomputed bitmap etc are well within the scope someone can learn within a couple of months without being hard-pressed. There are a number of steps, but each step is quite small. Just as in school - the teacher does not start the first day with line integrals or laplace transforms.


I have specifically tried not to send anyone in circles, but to do all specific talk at a proper level. Discussing different optimization methods of ring buffers will easilly send Aamir in circles. But we are not talking about just this thread. There are at least two or three other threads too, handling nonexisting C++ support in Keil. Handling long for loops in an interrupt handler. Handling memory overwrites. Handling use of shift registers. Handling row-drive transistors. There has not been any lack of help in this forum. A large number of people have helped. And helped very well too, in my view. There seems to be two persons on this forum (besides possibly the OP) who thinks differently. I don't know how many other forums you frequent, but the kind of help offered is representative of the help normally given on forums. And the amount of help is probably better than normal. Forums are normally not used for turn-key solutions, but means to discuss concepts and to help people who have gotten stuck to get one step forward. Help to self-help.

I don't know if you realize it, but at least in Sweden, all universities have a common database where all published studies, project reports etc gets indexed. But this database is also indexing quite a number of forums and web pages. And the goal is to cross-correlate student reports with this database to catch copy-paste solutions. I don't think Sweden is unique in this. I would expect the schools of most of the western world to spend significant time and effort on this problem. Why would they do that, if they thought it ok that students get their solutions from the net instead of solving the problems themselves?

We live in a marvelous time. We have Google! But Google is only fantastic if you know how to write the search queries. And the returned solutions will only be useful if you understand them. Black magic has never been a long-term solution to make the society move forward. Black magic gave us snake oil vendors, or radium water purifiers that made the water radioactive. But it maked people happy because they got an instant solution to a problem. Pre-chewed information will not make your mind grow. At all. It will only make us dumber. Some people spend a lot of time doing crosswords or playing chess to keep their brain in trim. I am lucky enough to have a job that constantly brings forward new problems to solve. The bad part if of course that I have a job with a lot of stress, and stress is known to reduce our ability to learn. But we all need problems to solve - it doesn't matter if we are gardeners trying to figure out the best way to grow a more beautiful lilly or if we are carpenters looking at a piece of wood and figuring how best to use it. Look at elderly. A huge percent of elderly who don't have a hobby or similar to activate them will be dead within the first year of retirement.

In the end it doesn't matter if you are young or old. If this is a school project or a private hobby project. What matters is that the way to a solution is often more important than the solution. The same can be seen for commercial projects. The customer wants product A. But after having spent time with the customer and turned and twisted the problem for some time, the optimum product for the customer will often end up very different from their originally planned product. A smart customer don't just buy 2000 man-hours. They pay for the know-how to get a great solution. And it is all the time spent working towards a final product that will decide if they get a market killer or just a copy of a product their competitor released one year ago.

I'm so sorry if it irritates you, but the only way I see that I can help on a forum is in a step-by-step fashion, focusing as much on "why" as on "how". As I see it, you will have to pay for the luxury of not knowing what happens inside your product :)