Nathan asked a very simple, clear, question. From his second question, you concluded that he's a neophyte, and doesn't know his *rse from a hot rock. That's quite likely. However, giving him the answer to the first question will start him down some path, heaven knows what path, but it will start him along, and he'll ask the next question, and the next, as we've all seen time after time, or he'll give up, as he's apparently done. I believe we'd have saved a lot of bandwidth had we done that. Now, having this discussion is probably useful also.

Consider our Brazilian friend Chico. He's come back again and again, having started from inadequately detailed questions, and we haven't made it easy for him, in part because we see things from different viewpoints, and in part because his questions and task descriptions are not always particularly clear. He's ultimately come back with questions, the answers to which actually helped him, though.

Do you remember that Canadian kid who wanted to run his 87C51 in 8032 mode with external flash and ram at 18.432 MHz? He clearly wasn't fully equipped to tackle his task, and ended up fiddling with PCB manufacture on his kitchen table. I'm sure that was amusing to him, and there was considerable information transfer at various times in that thread. I don't recall that he ever got anywhere aside from having attempted to make a PCB. He asked a lot of questions that seemed to follow, more or less the sequence I mentioned earlier.

I've been paying attention to those queries that looked to me like beginners who had some physical hardware but didn't know what to do with it. I believe that innovation largely comes from people who lack the conventional prejudice that comes with formal education and the associated hubris. People who are told they "can't get there from here" are often the ones who find a way. I believe it's beneficial to help them, as they often can work their way through their own ignorance. A little success in such an endeavor can go a long way. After all, you learn more from failure than from success.

One more thing ... I'm always hesitant to recommend ISP parts simply because of all the hassle I've observed, largely with ATMEL parts and ATMEL-recommended circuits, and, of course, the unfortunate liberties so many kitchen-table operators have taken with them. The commercial programmers that actually work with these aren't free, and the MCU's that they work with aren't always the ones that the person asking the questions can readily obtain. I'm not exactly sure of how this should be handled. Eval boards like the SiLabs ones are, from what I've observed and read, quite complete, but represent an investment comparable with many commercial programmers, some used, some new.

I think these "newbies" need to be handled with somewhat less overwhelming force. I believe a lot of them are run off by the huge amount of, from their viewpoint, pretty random information that's thrown at them. I believe we'd do a lot better with them if we answered their question, however silly it might seem, with a concise answer, and hope, if it's truly silly, they come back with more narrow questions. It wouldn't be a bad thing to tell them that their question is hard to understand, however.

RE