My question is no more complicated than the title suggests. What specifically do Arm Staff look for in a question posted on these forums when deciding whether or not it’s worth their time to respond?
It’s my experience that very simple questions from new users, that are obviously only just starting to use Mbed OS, appear to be the priority; whereas questions whereby people are using more advanced features of Mbed OS just seem to be completely ignored.
It seems to me that there’s no benefit in taking time to contributing to the community from a user’s perspective. I’ve spent many hours on these forums browsing through, seeing where I can help people. But when I need help, being a more advanced user asking more than ‘How do I toggle a GPIO pin?’, there’s no help in sight and I’m stuck for weeks, or months.
Maybe this is less of a question, more of a rant. I remember a while back looking into paid support for Mbed. I think the cheapest category started at about £30k. Being a small business this just isn’t feasible. Community support isn’t enough, but if we had a spare £30k we’d hire another engineer, not pay for support.
Partnership is actually something we’ve been looking into as we’re aiming to get our hardware certified as ‘Mbed Enabled’. Maybe this is something we’ll have to fast-track.
Thanks for your response and I appreciate the offer to contact some of your colleagues for tips.
Sorry that we didn’t make the forum be a better place for developers.
In the past one year, there were some significant changes, like consolidating our forum and move all the non-bug questions/enhancement to forum. The reason we did that is we want the forum become the main place for discussing anything Mbed relevant.
However we are really out of resource to support all the topics on forum, that not only frustrates you but also us, we only have limited time to check the topics, and sometimes the tough ones are lied in our backlog but never get a chance to be alive…
We really appreciate you give us this feedback, that reminds us the support requirement from community is very strong, they need our help and once they got the answer, that would help others as well. As I know, most of the Mbed developers are still fresh and they don’t know how to debug in embedded system, that causes the “Answer Producer” is less than the “Question Producer”, it ends up to most of the questions are still there, forever.
Anyway we know we are not good enough, we will figure out a way to improve it.
I’ve been doing this Mbed thing since the beginning (rather than Arduino).
Almost always I have found there is someone that can help me and I now try to help others as far as I can.
Maybe not the best answers but perhaps some pointers that can help.
It would be nice if others that could spare a little time just to scan the questions and see if they have an answer to help.
The forum page is now set up in a way that I can scan down the new questions and if over my head then I can discard them.
It’s not always about rocket science but if the simple questions could be handled by none Mbed staff then they will have more time for the important complex stuff.
