On-Topicness of Embedded Programming Questions

Question

Intel SPI flash descriptor

While this question is a bit unclear at the moment I wanted to get a community view on embedded programming questions in general. Should they be generally on-topic? Off-topic?

Answer 1

As an active Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange user I say that the particular question would be completely on topic there and currently the OP would receive more professional answers over there. So in this particular case I support the redirection of the OP to EE.SE.

Also this question is not the best example or material for us to decide the on-topicness of Embedded Programming questions in general. It is unclear, I generally do not like such questions without the datasheet for example. Also there are some terms that are not obvious at first glance. It could be more coherent as well.

But we should certainly consider @Gilles suggestion. Personally I would not accept any question about any processor or microcontroller but banishing all of them has its drawback too.

Let's wait and see what kind of questions we will have in the upcoming weeks and make a decision when we have more material in the subject.

Answer 2

I think that this particular case is off-topic here as it refers to the firmware programming of the Intel Atom SoC - more or less a general purpose computer that is not limited to IoT use cases. The question does not address an IoT specific system and does not even explicitely states the use related to IoT.

Answer 3

This question is on-topic, since it's about designing a part of an IoT device.

Yes, the part in question could also be used outside of IoT, but that's irrelevant. Our job here is to know about IoT; we aren't to know whether a particular device is “specific to IoT”. That would be pretty meaningless anyway: if I take a component that's sold under some IoT brand (as good a test as any to assert that it does qualify as IoT), and I never connect it to any network, does it somehow lose its IoT status?

The right question is, is the question relevant to IoT? It certainly is: it's about programming firmware for an IoT device.

If this site is to cater for IoT professionals, this sort of topic is exactly what we need.

Where I have doubts about this question is whether it's answerable. There's really not much information to go on. I don't quite understand what it's asking: is the author writing ROM code or an OS? But maybe that's because I'm unfamiliar with this platform.